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Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01

Rodney Brooks · 1 Jan 2026

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A robotaxi that still needs remote human help loses the cost advantage that motivated it, which pushes out when it can scale.

Their wordsSystems 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.

Also said by Timothy B. Lee

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Rodney Brooks did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Tesla's robotaxi service is a facade rather than a real driverless service, and it is not on a path to becoming one.

    Their wordsTesla (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.

  2. Our reading

    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 wordsAs 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.

  3. Our reading

    A robotaxi that still needs remote human help loses the cost advantage that motivated it, which pushes out when it can scale.

    Mental modelSecond-order thinking

    Their wordsSystems 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.

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