Devices of the Soul (Hardcover)

Chapter 13. Flesh and Machines:The Mere Assertions of Rodney Brooks

In Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (2002) robotics guru Rodney Brooks informs us that “we are nothing more than a highly ordered collection of biomolecules”:

Molecular biology has made fantastic strides over the last fifty years, and its goal is to explain all the peculiarities and details of life in terms of molecular interactions. A central tenet of molecular biology is that that is all there is.

Apparently fearing that we will be insufficiently gripped by his message, Brooks (who was director of the prestigious Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT when he wrote this book) goes on to say in the space of three pages:

The body, this mass of biomolecules, is a machine that acts according to a set of specifiable rules.

The body is a machine.

We are machines, as are our spouses, our children, and our dogs.

We are nothing more than the sort of machine we saw inChapter 3, where I set out simple sets of rules that can be combined to provide the complex behavior of a walking robot.... We are much like the robot Genghis, although somewhat more complex in quantity, but not in quality.

I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines.

We, all of us, overanthropomorphize humans, who are after all mere machines. (pp. 173–75)

Noting that some people may bristle at the word “machine” (not to mention the tedious repetition), Brooks acknowledges that he uses the word “to perhaps brutalize the reader a little.” ...