Jonathan Scholz

I’m Jon. I’ve done lots of fun projects over the years, and this website is a museum for the ones I could be bothered to write up.

Most of them started with some version of “surely I can do that myself.” I like understanding how stuff works, and I don’t quite believe I understand something unless I can build or fix it myself. This began with reasonable things like cars and motorcycles. By my late teens it escalated to “intelligence,” and I’ve been stuck there ever since.

Broadly speaking, my arc was four years of neuroscience (to understand the problem before trying to build a solution), a PhD in robotics (a robot is more or less the whole AI problem), and nine years starting and running the Applied Robotics team at DeepMind.

DeepMind taught me a lot, but the most important lesson was that robot capability doesn’t count for much until somebody else can use it. It also taught me that robots are still, mostly, a solution looking for a problem, and robotics researchers are generally quite bad at guessing what that is.

For the past year and a half I’ve been co-founder and CEO of Reimagine Robotics. I started R2 with an incredible group of humans, and it builds our collective experiences at the cutting edge of AI.  If you’re curious about R2, go there.

The personal version is that I’m deeply fed up with robots being only for roboticists. I think the scientific problem and the economic problem have the same answer: put robotics in the hands of the people who need it. I want the people who understand the work to be able to teach the robots themselves.

And maybe someday, a robot to give my mom the agency that she gave me.