Abstract: I like to think that robots should be rational agents, modeled on human behavior. I teach a course about using optimization to plan over time by maximizing utility. I note that a series of Nobel Prizes in Economics, starting with CMU’s own AI pioneer Herb Simon and including one to Daniel Kahneman and this year’s Nobel Prize to Richard Thaler, have recognized those who argue that people are not rational agents. I particularly like this quote from the New York Times article on this year’s prize: “Professor Thaler has written that he began to have ‘deviant thoughts’ in graduate school. He would ask people about their actual choices, an exercise that most economists regarded as irrelevant, and he found that the answers he got were different from what was in textbooks.” I hope to have a conversation acknowledging the serendipity and opportunism in one’s career. In high school I was turned off by computers by the experience of typing away at 300 baud on a teletype, although the paper tape was cool. I majored in biochemistry in college, but was petrified by the lab work. I took Patrick Winston’s AI course at MIT, and thought robotics was too primitive to go anywhere (around 1980, it mostly focused on static locomotion, see http://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1968-phony-pony-frank-mcghee-american/). I got turned on by a neuroscience course and got a PhD in Psychology (later renamed Brain and Cognitive Sciences). I realized robots have feelings too, and got interested in robotics on the 2nd try. So I guess I am now working in robot psychology. None of this was really planned or optimized.