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Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.

From one piece Robot Basketball 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  General-purpose humanoid robots will end up less useful than many specialized robots.

  Their words

  The greater lesson I think we will learn is that a general humanoid robot is not going to be that useful.

  Robot Basketballkk.org

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Specialized robots will invent techniques in their domain that humans never thought of or could not do.

  Their words

  Basketball robots are likely to invent new basketball moves that humans didn't think of doing, or couldn't do easily.

  Robot Basketballkk.org

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Robots will not be able to beat the best human basketball players in a full game by 2040.

  Their words

  I bet against this timeline and say they will not. The winner has to buy a round of gelato.

  Robot Basketballkk.org

Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI and robots will more than double the global economy in less than ten years.

  Their words

  AI+robots will more than double the global economy in less than 10 years

  @elonmusk on Xx.com

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Linux

  Their words

  The case for *total* Linux victory (desktop, mobile, server, iot, robots, embedded…): 1) Most agent-programmable People will want fully personalized computing experiences.

  x.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Humanoid robots paired with AI will eventually deliver medical care to everyone on Earth.

  Their words

  One day, Optimus + Grok will provide incredible medical care to all the people of Earth

  @elonmusk on Xx.com

Co-founder and former chief executive of Uber, now chief executive of CloudKitchens and of Adams, an industrial AI company automating food, mining and transport.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Industrial-scale automation will be done by specialised machines that move on wheels, not by humanoid robots, which only suit low-scale tasks in human environments.

  Their words

  If you're doing highcale tasks, industrial scale tasks, you are going to make specialized machines that move and act in the physical world. The key part is move. If they're moving, they got to have wheels.

  youtube.com

Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

From one piece Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Robots are slow because the people teleoperating their training data were slow, so the only two ways out are faster data or a policy faster than its data.

  Their words

  and yeah, I think it's either you need to figure out how to make the data faster or you need to figure out how to be faster than the data. We've seen the evidence of being able to be a little bit faster than the data.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most future robotics training data will be robots' own autonomous attempts, the way most language-model data is now generated by the model itself.

  Their words

  Uh and just like how we see in language models how now a lot of time is spent actually generating data, generating synthetic data by actually running the model and having it think through things. I think a lot of the data in the future in robotics is going to be the robot attempting to do lots of tasks in lots of real world circumstances.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Watching humans is not enough for a robot: there is no substitute for experience gathered on its own body.

  Their words

  Uh and likewise um robots can't like watch a person doing something and then figure out how to do it themselves directly. They really need their experience on their own platform um to learn effectively.

  youtube.com

+ 1 more

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reinforcement learning cannot be scaled for robots the way it was for language models, because every attempt spends real robot hours instead of data-centre compute.

  Their words

  Now maybe this isn't completely out of the question but this would be quite challenging uh to do and that's because the calculus is a little bit different. We're not just running compute to optimize for a use case. We're actually running the robot in the real world and using the hardware and attempting the task in the real world.

  youtube.com

Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI that is merely excellent at research and hardware can transform the world completely without ever being good at politics.

  Their words

  Like I think my perspective is like if the AIs are sufficiently good at R&D including hardware R&D, robots, whatever, then they can radically transform the world even if they're not that good at playing politics.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Robot makers will sell early robots at a loss because the real-world data they collect will be worth more than the hardware margin.

  Their words

  It will probably be economically shrewd to lose money on early robot models in anticipation that the data they gather will be worth more later in improving newer versions.

  Worldbuilding with Spatial Intelligencekk.org

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The ChatGPT moment for robotics already happened a couple of years ago; what remains is the unglamorous post-training work.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I would say the chat GPT moment of robots happened a couple of years ago already.

  Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIAyoutube.com

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Technology cannot let people escape politics, because politics arises from the existence of people who disagree with each other.

  Their words

  Unfortunately, no, because politics is about people who disagree with you. If you’re working with computers, or robots, or pure math, you don’t have politics.

  The Network Statethenetworkstate.com

Economist at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute; works on what advanced AI would do to growth, saving and the long-run economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is no single interest rate in a world of rapidly cheapening robots: measured in robots it might be ten thousand per cent.

  interest rates

  Their words

  It might be that every robot now can turn into, you know, 100 robots next year, right? So, in units of robots the interest rate is 10,000%.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Labour is a huge constraint on the AI build-out, and the way round it is to build data centres as modules in Asian factories rather than on site.

  data centers

  Their words

  um humanoid robots maybe start to or robotics at least start to but the main factor is going to be for reducing the number of people is modularizing things and making them in factories in Asia

  youtube.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

From one piece Speed Can Reindustrialize America 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Industrial robots are not the fix for American manufacturing, and betting on automation misreads why production sits elsewhere.

  America

  Their words

  The robot arm base case saves some hourly labor at the expense of adding more skilled labor, and can easily be negative if it needs reprogramming more than a few times per year.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

• Our readingkorrents.com

  China installs more robots than America because it has a surplus of underemployed engineers, not because robots are self-evidently the right answer.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  It has a surplus of STEM graduates that are often underemployed, while "Hukou" residency restrictions complicate hiring hourly labor in coastal factories.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most of the companies now selling a transport technology will quietly disappear, and the survivors will redefine what they are doing without renaming it.

  Their words

  As with self driving cars, most of the early players in humanoid robots, will quietly shut up shop and disappear. Those that remain will pivot and redefine what they are doing, without renaming it, to something more achievable and with, finally, plausible business cases.

  Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01rodneybrooks.com

Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Human workers will still be doing manufacturing alongside the machines for decades, so robots and AI will not settle the question of where things get made.

  Their words

  Even so, the flexible adaptable human will be working in manufacturing (alongside machines) for decades to come.

  molsonhart.com

Professor at Berkeley working on robot learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence, and argues that robots will learn from data rather than be programmed.

From one piece Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Robots will be given more scope as they get more capable, exactly the way coding assistants went from completing a function to writing a pull request.

  Their words

  So, I think it'll be the same thing that that we'll see an increase in the scope that we're giving that we're willing to give to the robots as they get better and better where initially the scope might be like there is a particular thing you do like you're making the coffee or something. Uh whereas as they get more capable, as their ability to have common sense and a broader repertoire of tasks increases, then we'll give them greater scope. Now you're running the whole coffee shop.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Better AI makes robots cheaper, because cheap visual feedback removes the need for expensive mechanical precision.

  Their words

  So traditional robots and factories uh they need to make motions that are highly repeatable and therefore it requires a degree of precision and robustness that you don't need if you can use cheap visual feedback. So AI also makes robots more affordable uh and lowers the requirements on the hardware.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reinforcement learning only works once a model already knows something, which is why robots must be pre-trained by imitation first.

  Their words

  Uh so in order to effectively learn from your own experience, it turns out that it's really really important to already know something about what you're doing. Otherwise, it takes far too long.

  youtube.com

+ 2 more

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Robotics has a bootstrap that computing never had: making robots is physical work, and robots do physical work.

  Their words

  robots help with uh physical things uh physical work. And if producing robots is itself physical work, then getting really good at robotics should help with that. It's a little circular, of course.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Robots will learn from deployment more easily than chatbots do, because a physical mistake is obvious the moment it happens.

  Their words

  Like if you answer a question, you just like answered it wrong. It's like well it's not like you can just like go back and like tweak a few things like the person you told the answer to might not even know that it's wrong. Whereas if you're like folding the t-shirt and you messed up a little bit like it's pretty obvious like you can reflect on that, figure out what happened and do it better next time.

  youtube.com

From one piece America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  China already installs several times more industrial robots a year than the United States does, and cheaper ones.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  First, China, on a yearly basis installs 7x as many industrial robots as we do in the United States.

  molsonhart.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Industrial robots are not the fix for American manufacturing, and betting on automation misreads why production sits elsewhere.

  America

  Their words

  Automation will not save us.

  molsonhart.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  It would be depressing to reach AGI and still need a human body to get anything done in the physical world, so robots have to be part of the transition.

  AGI

  Their words

  I think it’s depressing if we have AGI and the only way to get things done in the physical world is to make a human go do it. So I really hope that as part of this transition, as this phase change, we also get humanoid robots or some sort of physical world robots.

  youtube.com

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A highly dynamic economy that cheaply mass-produces robots may increase rather than decrease the risk of Malthusian resource dilemmas.

  Their words

  A very dynamic economy probably will be very good at building lots of robots cheaply, which may make us more rather than less likely to end up in Malthusian dilemmas.

  tylercowen.com