Mark Rober

Mark Rober (born 1980) spent nine years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — including work on the Curiosity Mars rover — and a stint at Apple before becoming one of YouTube’s most-watched creators. His engineering spectacles (package-thief glitter bombs, squirrel ninja-warrior courses, world-record devices) double as science lessons, and his company CrunchLabs ships build-it-yourself engineering boxes to hundreds of thousands of kids.

The calculator argument

Speaking to a packed Stanford auditorium in May 2025, Rober fielded the era’s defining classroom question from CS lecturer Nick Parlante: does AI let students skip the practice that builds real skill? Rober’s answer was the engineer’s: he compared AI to calculators and to every navigation tool that replaced map-reading and animal-tracking — sympathizing with the loss, but concluding that once the tool exists, the winning move is mastery, not refusal. Both men described themselves as optimists about AI benefiting humanity; of builders’ chances of pulling that off, Rober offered, “We’re naive enough to think we can. And sometimes, we actually do.”

His optimism is not naive about misuse. In April 2025 Rober was among the handful of top creators — alongside MrBeast and Marques Brownlee — who piloted YouTube’s likeness-detection technology, which finds AI-generated videos wearing a creator’s face so they can demand removal. Rober had personal cause: scammers had repeatedly deepfaked prominent YouTubers for crypto schemes, and his own face is among the most recognizable on the platform.

The combination is characteristic: embrace the tool, engineer the safeguards. It is the same posture as his videos, where the response to package thieves was not a complaint but a better-built machine.