“Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us is a short, stimulating book written by one of the major players in the field about the state of robotics and its short-term future.”
We will have robots with feelings and consciousness in 20 years, Brooks says. But countering roboticist Marvin Minsky, he eliminates cognition issues and concentrates on improving vision and reaction time, asserting that “higher functions” derive from the senses and reacting to them.

Brooks also predicts we’ll see an explosion of humanoid robots and will award them human rights.