Rodney Brooks
Robotics researcher, emeritus professor at MIT and former director of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, co-founder of iRobot and Rethink Robotics, now at Robust.AI. Since January 2018 he has published dated predictions about self-driving cars, robotics and human spaceflight and scored them in public every New Year's Day, a commitment he made through 2050.
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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.
↗Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01rodneybrooks.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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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.
↗Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01rodneybrooks.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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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.
↗Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01rodneybrooks.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 9 months earlier
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Our reading
Deploying a new technology at scale takes decades, far longer than the people building it imagine.
Their wordsDeployment at scale takes so much longer than anyone ever imagines.
- 3 months earlier
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Our reading
Actual self-driving turned out to be far harder than almost everyone believed it would be.
Their wordsActual self-driving is now generally accepted to be much harder than every one believed.
↗Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01rodneybrooks.com 1st of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsWaymo 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 01rodneybrooks.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsQ3 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 01rodneybrooks.com 4th of 4 in this piece
- 2 years earlier
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Their wordsI 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?rodneybrooks.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsAll 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?rodneybrooks.com 2nd of 2 in this piece