Rodney Brooks
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.
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Where they publish
Blog rodneybrooks.com His blog on robots, AI and predictions he grades himself on. Has a feed.
Recent
- Four Time Scales for Technology Development and Deployment 2 Aug 2026 I have come to understand four very different time scales for development of technologies and their deployments. And I think people often jump between them and end up making outrageously wrong, and sometimes damaging, p…
- House Cleaning My January 1, 2018 Predictions 26 Jul 2026 Quick Summary: I am going to continue to do my yearly update on three sets of technologies every January 1st. I am going to decouple them from my prediction tables from the first post on January 1st, 2018, as the dates…
- Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01 1 Jan 2026 Nothing is ever as good as it first seems and nothing is ever as bad as it first seems. — A best memory paraphrase of advice given to me by Vice Admiral Joe Dyer, former chief test pilot of the US Navy and former Comman…
Show 7 more
- A Prophetic Poem about Artificial Intelligence Written in 1961 3 Nov 2025 In early September a poem about AI started circulating on social media, with a publication date of 1961. At first it just seemed too cute to me and I thought it might be fake, or written by an LLM, passed off as written…
- Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity 27 Sept 2025 In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their…
- Alan Turing on Embodied Intelligence 20 Sept 2025 The term “Embodied AI” is having its moment in the sun right now. For me, that is what I have spent my career working on, and I have repeatedly published articles using the term “embodied intelligence”. I recently stumb…
- AI: great expectations 11 Aug 2025 This time around I decided on a guest column. The guest is a 37 years ago younger me, and this post is one that I wrote for Manufacturing Engineering in March of 1988. It was for the last page of the trade magazine, in…
- Parallels between Generative AI and Humanoid Robots 5 May 2025 Anyone who reads just about anything these days will know there are two big things in AI at the moment. They are Generative AI and Humanoid Robots. There is a lot of hype about these two new (to most people) versions of…
- Deployment at scale takes decades 17 Apr 2025 Of course, I am filled with fear and anger at the political situation in the US, but we can’t forget about research and how it interplays with the innovation economy of the United States and other countries. The short a…
- Five new technology predictions for the next decade 14 Apr 2025 On March 26th I skeeted out five technology predictions, talking about developments over the next ten years through January 1st, 2036. I’ll incorporate these new predictions into my scorecard posts (every Jan 1st) and s…
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 9 beliefs, 1 changed mind — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
A robotaxi that still needs remote human help loses the cost advantage that motivated it, which pushes out when it can scale.
Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations to make a business case for their adoption and therefore their time horizon to scaling across geographies.
Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01 Said 1 Jan 2026
Tesla's robotaxi service is a facade rather than a real driverless service, and it is not on a path to becoming one.
Tesla (owned by Tesla) has put on a facade of being operational, but it is not operational in the sense of the other two services, and faces regulatory headwinds that both Waymo and Zoox have long been able to satisfy. They are not on a path to becoming a real service.
Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01 Said 1 Jan 2026
Most of the companies now selling a transport technology will quietly disappear, and the survivors will redefine what they are doing without renaming it.
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 01 Said 1 Jan 2026
Show 6 more
Deploying a new technology at scale takes decades, far longer than the people building it imagine.
Deployment at scale takes so much longer than anyone ever imagines.
Deployment at scale takes decades Said 17 Apr 2025
Actual self-driving turned out to be far harder than almost everyone believed it would be.
Actual self-driving is now generally accepted to be much harder than every one believed.
Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01 Said 1 Jan 2025
The driverless taxi services that exist arrived years earlier than expected but are not what was promised: remote humans are in the loop.
Waymo now has a service that looks and feels like this in San Francisco, 8 years earlier than I predicted. But it is not what every one was expecting. There are humans in the loop.
Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01 Said 1 Jan 2025
Electric cars will not reach 30% of US sales by 2027; the forecasts that looked pessimistic in 2018 were still too optimistic.
Q3 2024 had the rate 8.9% so there is no way it can reach 30% in 2027. I was way too optimistic at a time when EV enthusiasts thought I was horribly pessimistic.
Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01 Said 1 Jan 2025
The air-taxi industry's forecasts are not backed by flying hardware: there are no videos of prototypes doing what the hype says will be routine within three years.
I see lots of hype about eVTOLs being on the verge of being big, but I can’t find any videos of prototypes doing what the hype says will be common place by 2025.
Where Are The Crewed eVTOL Videos? Said 5 Nov 2022
A radically new product needs many separate technologies to arrive together, and waiting for that convergence can take decades.
All radically new products, and air taxi eVTOLs certainly count as radically new, require the convergence of many different capabilities and technologies. Often one or more technology will be lagging and it may take decades for them all to come together in the right place at the right time.
Where Are The Crewed eVTOL Videos? Said 5 Nov 2022
Beliefs others hold too
A robotaxi that still needs remote human help loses the cost advantage that motivated it, which pushes out when it can scale. 2 hold this
Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations to make a business case for their adoption and therefore their time horizon to scaling across geographies.
Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01 Said 1 Jan 2026
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Feed
As its own page →Hiding
2 August
26 July
1 January
From one piece Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01 3 beliefs · rodneybrooks.com
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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.
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korrents.com
Tesla's robotaxi service is a facade rather than a real driverless service, and it is not on a path to becoming one.Their words
Tesla (owned by Tesla) has put on a facade of being operational, but it is not operational in the sense of the other two services, and faces regulatory headwinds that both Waymo and Zoox have long been able to satisfy. They are not on a path to becoming a real service.
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Their words
Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations to make a business case for their adoption and therefore their time horizon to scaling across geographies.
3 November 2025
27 September 2025
20 September 2025
11 August 2025
5 May 2025
17 April 2025
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korrents.com
Deploying a new technology at scale takes decades, far longer than the people building it imagine.Their words
Deployment at scale takes so much longer than anyone ever imagines.
14 April 2025
Nothing matches.
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