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Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

243 points by timr 2y ago

rexreed 2y ago
I like Rodney Brooks, but I find the way he does these predictions to be very obtuse and subject to a lot of self-congratulatory interpretation. Highlighting something green that is "NET2021" and then saying he was right when something happened or didn't happen, when something related happened in 2024 mean that he predicted it right or wrong, or is everything subject to arbitrary interpretation? Where are the bold predictions? Sounds like a lot of fairly obvious predictions with a lot of wiggle room to determine if right or wrong.
- gcr 2y ago
  NET2021 means that he predicted that the event would take place on or after 2021, so happening in 2024 satisfies that. Keep in mind these are six-year-old predictions. Are you wishing that he had tighter confidence intervals?
  - rexreed 2y ago
    If the predictions are meant to be bold, then yes. If they're meant to be fairly obvious, then no. For example, saying that flying cars will be in widespread use NET 2025 is not much of a prediction. I think we can all say that if flying cars will be in widespread use, it will happen No Earlier Than 2025. It could happen in 2060, and that NET 2025 prediction would still be true. He could mark it green in 2026 and say he was right, that, yes, there are no flying cars, and so mark his scorecard another point in the correct column. But is that really a prediction? A bolder prediction would be, say "Within 1-2 yrs of XX". So what is Rodney Brooks really trying to predict and say? I'd rather read about what the necessary gating conditions are for something significant and prediction-worthy to occur, or what the intractable problems are that would make something not be possible within a predicted time, rather than reading about him complain about how much overhype and media sensation there is in the AI and robotics (and space) fields. Yes, there is, but that's not much of a prediction or statement either, as it's fairly obvious. There's also a bit of an undercurrent of complaint in this long article about how the not-as-sexy or hyped work he has done for all those years has gone relatively unrewarded and "undeserving types" are getting all the attention (and money). And as such, many of the predictions and commentary on them read more as rant than as prediction.
    - Denzel 2y ago
      Presumably you read the section where Brooks highlights all the forecasts executives were making in 2017? His NET predictions act as a sort of counter-prediction to those types of blind optimistic, overly confident assertions. In that context, I’d say his predictions are neither obvious nor lacking boldness when we have influential people running around claiming that AGI is here today, AI agents will enter the workforce this year, and we should be prepared for AI-enabled layoffs.
    - riffraff 2y ago
      The NET estimation is supposed to be a counter to the irrational exuberance of media and PR. E.g. musk says they'll get humans to Mars in 2020, and the counter is "I don't think that will happen until at least 2030".
- kragen 2y ago
  "NET2021" means "no earlier than 2021". So, if nothing even arguably similar happened until 2024, that sounds like a very correct prediction. Whether that's worth congratulating him about depends on how obvious it was, but I think you really need to measure "fairly obvious" at the time the prediction is made, not seven years later. A lot of things that seem "fairly obvious" now weren't obvious at all then.
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? Rodney Brooks Predictions Scorecard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34477124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34477124 - Jan 2023 (41 comments) Predictions Scorecard, 2021 January 01 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706436 - Jan 2021 (12 comments) Predictions Scorecard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18889719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18889719 - Jan 2019 (4 comments)
sashank_1509 2y ago
Feels too self-congratulatory when he claims to be correct about self driving in the Waymo case. The bar he set is so broad and ambiguous, that probably anything Waymo did, would not qualify as self driving to him. So he think humans are intervening once every 1-2 miles to train the Waymo, we’re not even sure if that is true, I heard from friends that it was 100+ miles but let us say Waymo comes out and says it is 1000 miles. Then I bet Rodney can just fiddle with goal post and say that 3.26 trillion miles were driven in US in 2024, and having a human intervene 1000 miles would mean 3.26 billion interventions, and that this is clearly not self driving. In fact until Waymo disables Internet on all cars and prices it never needs any intervention ever, Rodney can claim he’s right, even then maybe not stopping exactly where Rodney wanted it to, might be proof that self driving doesn’t work. Next big thing after deep learning prediction is clearly false. LLM is deep learning, scaled up, we are not in any sense looking past deep learning. Rodney I bet wanted it to be symbolic AI, but that is most likely a dead end, and the bitter lesson actually holds. In fact we have been riding this deep learning wave since Alex-Net 2012. OpenAI talked about scaling since 2016 and during that time the naysayers could be very confident and claim we needed something more, but OpenAI went ahead and proved out the scaling hypothesis and passed the language Turing test. We haven’t needed anything more except scale and reasoning has also turned out to be similar. Just an LLM trained to reason, no symbolic merger, not even a search step it seems like.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  Your objection to him claiming a win on self driving is that you think that we can still define cars as self driving even when humans are operating them? Ok I disagree. If humans are operating them then they simply are not self driving by any sensible definition.
  - sashank_1509 2y ago
    Human interventions are some non zero number in current self driving cars and will likely be that way for a while. Does this mean self driving is a scam and in fact it is just a human driving, and that these are actually ADAS. Maybe in some pedantic sense, you are right but then your definition is not useful, since it lumps cruise control/ lane-keeping ADAS and Waymo’s in the same category. Waymo is genuinely, qualitatively a big improvement above any ADAS/ self driving system that we have seen. I suspect Rodney did not predict even Waymo’s to be possible, but gave himself enough leeway so that he can pedantically argue that Waymo’s are just ADAS and that his prediction was right.
_yb2s 2y ago
It seems to me that the redefined flying cars for extremely wealthy people did happen? eVTOLs are being sold/delivered to the general public. Certainly still pretty rare, as I've never seen one in real life. I'd love to have one but would probably hate a world where everyone has them. Not really wanting to have this argument a second time in a week (seriously- just look at my past comments instead of replying here as I said all I care to say https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42588699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42588699), but he is totally wrong about LLMs just looking up answers in their weights- they can correctly answer questions about totally fabricated new scenarios, such as solving simple physics questions that require tracking the location of objects and reporting where they will likely end up based on modeling the interactions involved. If you absolutely must reply that I am wrong at least try it yourself first in a recent model like GPT-4o and post the prompt you tried.
- laweijfmvo 2y ago
  Kobe Bryant basically commuted by helicopter, when it was convenient. It may have even taken off and landed at his house, but probably not exactly at all of his destinations. Is a “flying car” fundamentally that much different?
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    I think the difference is that a helicopter is extremely technical to fly requiring complex and expensive training, and the eVTOL is supposed to be extremely simple to fly. Also the eVTOL in principle is really cheap to make if you just consider the materials and construction costs- probably eventually much cheaper than a car. I was curious so I looked up how much you can buy the cheapest new helicopters for, and they are cheaper than an eVTOL right now- the XE composite is $68k new, and things like that can be ~25k used. I'm shocked one can in principle own a working helicopter for less than the price of a 7 year old Toyota Camry.
    - xarope 2y ago
      But I'm sure running costs (aviation fuel), hanger costs, maintenance costs, cost to maintain pilot license are far more expensive, compared to driving a car.
Animats 2y ago
> That being said, we are not on the verge of replacing and eliminating humans in either white collar jobs or blue collar jobs. Tell that to someone laid off when replaced by some "AI" system. > Waymo not autonomous enough It's not clear how often Waymo cars need remote attention, but it's not every 1-2 miles. Customers would notice the vehicle being stopped and stuck during the wait for customer service. There are many videos of people driving in Waymos for hours without any sign of a situation that required remote intervention. Tesla and Baidu do use remote drivers. The situations where Waymo cars get stuck are now somewhat obscure cases. Yesterday, the new mayor of SF had two limos double-parked, and a Waymo got stuck behind that. A Waymo got stuck in a parade that hadn't been listed on Muni's street closure list. > Flying cars Probably at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. They won't be cost-effective, but it will be a cool demo. EHang recently put solid state batteries into their flying car and got 48 minutes of flight time, instead of their previous 25 minutes. Ehang is basically a scaled-up quadrotor drone, with 16 motors and props. EHang been flying for years, but not for very long per recharge. Better batteries will help a lot. [1] https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/electric-air-taxi-flights-in-los-angeles-during-the-2028-summer-olympics/ https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/electric-air-taxi-flights-...
- shlomo_z 2y ago
  > Tell that to someone laid off when replaced by some "AI" system. What are some good examples? I am very skeptical of anyone losing their jobs to AI. People are getting laid off for various reasons: - Companies are replacing American tech jobs with foreigners - Many companies hired more devs than they need - companies hired many devs during the pandemic, and don't need them anymore Some companies may claim they are replacing devs with AI. I take it with a grain of salt. I believe some devs were probably replaced by AI, but not a large amount. I think there may be a lot more layoffs in the future, but AI will probably account for a very small fraction of those.
  - theLiminator 2y ago
    I imagine there aren't really layoffs, but slowing/stopping of hiring as you get more productivity out of existing devs. I imagine in the future, lots of companies will just let their employee base slowly attrition away.
vikrantrathore 2y ago
For me this predictions are kind of being aware of how progress can happen based on history, but this will not lead to any breakthrough. I am not in the camp of being skeptic so I still like the hype cycle, they create an environment for people to break the boundaries and sometimes help untested ideas and things to be explored. This might not have happen if there is no hype cycle. I am in the camp of people who are positive as George Bernard Shaw in his 2 quotes: 1. A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. 2. The reasonable person adapts themselves to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person. (Changed man to person as I feel it should be gender neutral) In hindsight when we look back, everything looks like we anticipated, so predictions are no different some pans out some doesn't. My feeling after reading prediction scorecard is that you need a right balance between risk averse (who are either doubtful or do not have faith things will happen quickly enough) and risk takers (one who is extremely positive) for anything good to happen. Both help humanity to move forward and are necessary part of nature. It is possible AGI might replace humans in a short term and then new kind of work emerges and humans again find something different. There is always a disruption with new changes and some survive and some can't, even if nothing much happens its worth trying as said in quote 1.
- sgt101 2y ago
  I feel a counter is that hyping and going along with hype leads to substantial misallocation of capital and this leads to human misery. How much money has been burned on robo-taxis which could have been spent on incubators for kids.
zzzeek 2y ago
what a weird writer, lots of interesting things to talk about but this very long essay continued to circle back to being author-self-obsessed with their own prowess and drawing out huge expositions and bullet lists on how well they are at predicting things. Call it self-referential-appeal-to-authority.
- mberning 2y ago
  It is odd. The product of a mind which clearly thinks very highly of itself.
- fifticon 2y ago
  Another perspective is that it is a person who takes great care/is very thorough, to examine and re-evaluate his reasonings, and makes an effort to explain the logic in his reasoning, which can be helpful if you are trying to figure out if you agree or disagree.
ynniv 2y ago
It's long, so I'm skimming a little and... flying cars. If you don't know why we don't have flying cars, you're not a good engineer. It really doesn't matter what prestigious lab you ran, as that apparently didn't impart the ability to think critically about engineering problems. [Hint: Flying takes 10x the energy of driving, and the cost/weight/volume of 1 MJ hasn't changed in close to a hundred years. Flying cars require a 10x energy breakthrough.]
- anon7000 2y ago
  The article is not optimistic on flying cars. The prediction is that an expensive flying car could be purchased no earlier than 2036, and notes a strong possibility that it won’t even happen by 2050. Plus states that minor success (aka 0.1% of car sales are flying cars) isn’t going to happen in his lifetime. The author also expands on this: > Don’t hold your breath. They are not here. They are not coming soon. > Nothing has changed. Billions of dollars have been spent on this fantasy of personal flying cars. It is just that, a fantasy, largely fueled by spending by billionaires. It’s worth actually reading the article before trashing someone’s career and engineering skills!
  - ynniv 2y ago
    Engineering is about focusing on what matters. There's no point in talking about flying cars: they will exist when portable fusion exists, so just talk about that.
    - cudgy 2y ago
      So you are saying that a true engineer doesn’t read articles and criticizes a successful engineer that wrote said article with hand-wavy arguments?
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  The article is responding to claims by CEOs of car companies, industry and business press, and other hype sources that keep predicting flying cars next year or so. It's predicting that, against this hype, it will not come to pass. Not sure why you've worded your comment in such a way as if the article was hyping up flying cars. Not to mention, since we do have helicopters, the engineering challange of flying cars is almost entirely unrelated to energy costs (at least for the super rich, the equivalent of, say, a Rolls Royce, not of a Toyota). The thing stopping flying cars from existing is that it is extremely hard to make an easy to pilot flying vehicle, given the numerous degrees of freedom (and potential catastrophic failure modes); and the significantly higher impredictability and variance of the medium (air vs road surface). Plus, the major problem of noise pollution, which gets to extreme levels for somewhat fundamental reasons (you have to diaplace a whole lot of air to fly; which is very close to having to create sound waves). So, overall, the energy problem is already fixed, we already have point-to-point flying vehicles usable, and occasionally used, in urban areas, helicopters. Making them safe when operated by a very lightly trained pilot, and silent enough to not wake up a neighborhood, are the real issues that will persist even if we had mini fusion reactors.
IAmGraydon 2y ago
Does it drive anyone else crazy when an author posts 15,000 words (yes, there are that many in this article) when 1,500 would have more than communicated the relevant information? The length of this article is almost comical.
andyferris 2y ago
So... he's not a fan of Elon Musk, I take it?
deleted 2y ago
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richrichie 2y ago
> It distorts where VC money goes, always to something that promises impossibly large payoffs–it seems it is better to have an untested idea that would have an enormous payoff than a tested idea which can get to a sustainable business But this is the whole point of VC investing. It is not normal distribution investing.
kookamamie 2y ago
It's far too rambly and vague to make any sense of the achieved results, I think.
lalaithion 2y ago
> A robot that has any real idea about its own existence, or the existence of humans in the way that a six year old understands humans It seems to me we’re at the very least close to this, unless you hold unproven beliefs about grey matter vs silicon.
kqr 2y ago
> 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 Technically true but I'm not convinced it matters that much. The reason autonomation took over in manufacturing was not that they could fire the operator entirely, but that one operator could man 8 machines simultaneously instead of just one.
SavageBeast 2y ago
In reading this I come to wonder if the current advances in "AI" are going to follow the Self Driving Car model. Turns out the 80% is relatively easy to do, but the remaining 20% to get it right is REALLY hard.
- brisky 2y ago
  Agree, that is why the agent hype is going to bust. Agent means giving AI control. That means critical failure modes and the need of human to constantly oversee agent working.
zetalyrae 2y ago
> LLMs have proved amazing facile with language. If you took a transcript of a conversation with Claude 3.6 Sonnet, and sent it back in time even five years ago (just before the GPT-3 paper was published), nobody would believe it was real. They would say that it was fake, or that it was witchcraft. And whoever believed it was real would instantly acknowledge that the Turing test had been passed. This refusal to update beliefs on new evidence is very tiresome.
- tkgally 2y ago
  Similarly if you could let a person from five years ago have a spoken conversation with ChatGPT Advanced Voice mode or Gemini Live. For me five years ago, the only giveaways that the voice on the other end might not be human would have been its abilities to answer questions instantaneously about almost any subject and to speak many different languages. The NotebookLM “podcasters” would have been equally convincing to me.
- harvodex 2y ago
  The whole point of the post is that many have updated their beliefs too much.
coderintherye 2y ago
Good example of everything that can wrong with a prediction market if left unchecked. Don't like that Waymo broke your prediction? Fine just move your goalposts. Like that prediction came true but on the wrong timeframe? Just move the goal posts. Glad Polymarket (and other related markets) exist so they can put actual goal posts in place with mechanisms that require certain outcomes in order to finalize on a prediction result.
- sashank_1509 2y ago
  Well said, shows even the most accomplished humans have the same biases as the rest of us when not held accountable
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  > Glad Polymarket (and other related markets) exist so Polymarket is a great way to incentive people into making their predictions happen, with all clandestine tools at their disposal, which is definitely not what you want for your society generally.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  Polymarket suffers from the same problem. This market https://polymarket.com/event/ethereum-etf-approved-by-may-31/ethereum-etf-approved-by-may-31?tid=1736539665436 https://polymarket.com/event/ethereum-etf-approved-by-may-31... was resolved in an extremely contentious way.
deleted 2y ago
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lifeisstillgood 2y ago
>>> [self driving cars are rmeote controlled] in all cases so far deployed, humans monitoring those cars from a remote location, and occasionally sending control inputs to the cars. Wait, What now? I have never heard this, but from the founder of CSAIL I am going to take it as a statement of fact and proof that basically every AI company is flat out lying. I mean the difference between remote piloting a drone that has some autonomous flying features (which they do to handle lag etc) and remote driving a car is … semantics? But yeah it’s just moving jobs from one location to another.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Note that even the examples he gives are related to things like an operator telling the car to overtake a stopped truck instead of waiting for it to start again. So occasional high level decisions, not minute-to-minute or even second-to-second interactions like you have when flying a drone. This is more like telling your units to go somewhere in a video game, and they mostly do it right, but occasionally you have to take a look and help them because they got stuck in a particularly narrow corridor or something.
- RamblingCTO 2y ago
  Nitpick: he's not the founder, not by far. He's just a past director of CSAIL
Over2Chars 2y ago
I am always a fan of people who pretend to have psychic powers. Predict the future, Mr. Brooks!
barnabyjones 2y ago
>Individually owned cars can go underground onto a pallet and be whisked underground to another location in a city at more than 100mph. I'm curious where this idea even came from, not sure who the customer would be, it's a little disappointing he doesn't mention mag-lev trains in a discussion about future rapid transit. I'd much rather ride a smooth mag-lev across town than an underground pallet system.
- qwertox 2y ago
  Yet such an underground system should exist to transport deliveries.
- kweingar 2y ago
  Elon Musk promised to build this tech.
qznc 2y ago
If someone wants to have a credible prediction scorecard, get it on some third-party platform like Metaculus, Manifold, GJOpen, Polymarket, ...
maverickmax90 2y ago
What you marked as hype is a flaw in your skill to recognize real world cases vs wishful thinking. You are not predicting just daydreaming.
FabHK 2y ago
LOL about the last paragraphs: > Let’s Continue a Noble Tradition! > The billionaire founders of both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin had faith in the systems they had created. They both personally flew on the first operational flights of their sub-orbital launch systems. They went way beyond simply talking about how great their technology was, they believed in it, and flew in it. > Let’s hope this tradition continues. Let’s hope the billionaire founder/CEO of SpaceX will be onboard the first crewed flight of Starship to Mars, and that it happens sooner than I expect. We can all cheer for that.
- tontonius 2y ago
  How am I supposed to read this ? a thinly veiled hatred for Mr. Musk?
  - FabHK 2y ago
    That's how I interpreted it, yes.
teractiveodular 2y ago
All that verbiage about robotaxis and not a single mention about China, which by all accounts is well ahead of the US in deploying them out on the road. (With a distinctly mixed track record, it must be said, but still.)
yearesadpeople 2y ago
Quite an unreadable web page, and somehow rationalising there was 'everything before me', and 'everything after me' with regard technology and prediction. Unfortunate understanding of reality really.
sinuhe69 2y ago
I always have a definitional problem with predictions. I mean, it's moot whether a specific prediction is right or wrong as long as it doesn't help us to understand the big picture and the trends. Take, for example, the prediction about "robots can autonomously navigate all US households". Why all? From the business POV, 80% of the market is "all" in a practical sense, and most people will consider navigation around the home as "solved" if they can do it for the majority of households and with virtually no intervention. Hilarious situations will arise that amuse the folks; video of clumsy robots will flood the internet instead of cats and dogs, but for the business site, it's lucrative enough to produce and sell them en masse. Another question of interest is how is the trend? What will the approximate cost of such a robot be? How many US households will adopt such a robot by which time, as they have adopted washing machines and dishwashers. Will we see a linear adoption or rather a logistic adoption? These are the more interesting questions than just whether I'm right or wrong.
nurettin 2y ago
I don't know the motivation behind making robotics and AI predictions, as these things have been done to death since the 70s, but I know people who bet for high inflation made a killing in financial futures.
deleted 2y ago
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Upvoter33 2y ago
The next big thing beyond deep learning being LLMs is funny
michaelbuckbee 2y ago
One interesting prediction category in the Venn diagram overlaps of Rodney's predictions that is missing is drone deliveries. Where I live (in suburbia Virginia), we now can get items from the local WalMart grocery via DroneUp, which kind of blows mind.
- sashank_1509 2y ago
  Wow I had no idea progress was being made in this front
skizm 2y ago
I don't have a pulse on how far self-driving has come from a tech standpoint, but from an outsider's perspective I'd say it is "achieved" when I can order a self-driving car from an app in all of the top 10 most populated cities in the US (since that's where it is being developed) with as much consistency as uber/lyft. The real final boss for self-driving will be the government red-tape that companies will need to get through. I doubt local governments will be a laissez faire with self-driving as they were with uber being an illegal taxi company.
- metalliqaz 2y ago
  the final boss will be the first big lawsuit against a manufacturer for liability after someone is killed by a driverless car Of course, then we will eventually see infrastructure become even more hostile to non-drivers and people will have to sue their own governments for the right to exist in public without paying transport companies. Strong Towns tried to warn us
  - skizm 2y ago
    Didn’t that already happen in Phoenix? They paused the program there, but unsure if there was actually a lawsuit or settlement.
    - metalliqaz 2y ago
      Wasn't there a human "monitor" in the car?
      - mrguyorama 2y ago
        There was, but the reality is that the modern US regulatory environment demonstrably doesn't care whether cars labled as self driving are actually capable of that safely, and have not demonstrated any interest in regulating such, and that was BEFORE we popularly elected a group of charlatans, hacks, and grifters that have all made "The courts will bend over backwards for us and our wealth" a huge part of America. Like, Reagan's instructions to the regulatory agencies to basically stand down was only just beginning to be undone after 40 years, and we immediately elected the people promising to slam hard in the other direction. America will be a regulatory free for all for business for decades.
bArray 2y ago
> The level of hype about AI, Machine Learning and Robotics completely distorts people’s understanding of reality. It distorts where VC money goes, always to something that promises impossibly large payoffs–it seems it is better to have an untested idea that would have an enormous payoff than a tested idea which can get to a sustainable business, but does not change the world for ever. One thing to remember is that there is more than one target audience in these claims. VCs for example seem to operate on a rough principle of 5 tech companies, 4 make 0x and one makes 10x, for a total 2x on each investment. If you only promise 5x, with 4 failures of 0x and one success at 5x, total return is 1x on each (not worth the risk). You may say "yes, my company is 2x, but it is guaranteed!" - but they all sell this idea. VCs could be infinitely good at predicting success and great companies, but it's based on partial information. Essentially companies have to promise the 10x and the VCs assume they are likely incorrect anyway, in order to balance the risk profile. I do have a fundamental problem with this "infinite growth" model that almost everything seems based on. > There is steady growth in sales but my prediction of 30% of US car sales being electric by 2027 now seems wildly optimistic. We need two doublings to get there in three years and the doubling rate seems more like one doubling in four to five years. Even one doubling in 4-5 years might be too much. There are fundamental issues to be addressed: 1. What do we do about crashed EVs? They are dangerous to store and dangerous to dismantle. There have been quite a few EV fires at places like Copart now. There is little to no value in crashed EVs because they are so dangerous, which pushes insurance up because they cannot recover these funds. 2. Most car dealerships in the UK refuse to accept EVs for trade-in, because they sit on their forecourt until they eventually die. Those who can afford EVs typically get them on finance when the batteries provide the fullest range. Nobody I know is buying 10 year old EVs with no available replacement batteries. Commerical fleets are also not buying any more EVs as they essentially get no money back after using them for 3 years or so. 3. The electrical grid cannot scale to handle EVs. With every Western country decarbonising their electrical grid in favour of renewable energy, they have zero ability to respond to increased load. The truth is, when they push to remove fossil fuel vehicles, they simply want to take your personal transport from you. There is no plan for everybody to maintain personal mobility, it'll be a privilege reserved for the rich. You'll be priced out and put onto public transport, where there will be regular strikes because the government is broke and wages cannot increase - because who knew, infinite growth is a terrible investment model. > The other thing that has gotten over hyped in 2024 is humanoids robots. > The visual appearance of a robot makes a promise about what it can do and how smart it is. The real sin is not HRI issues, it's that we simply cannot justify them. What job is a humanoid robot supposed to do? Who is going to be buying tens of thousands of the first unit? What is the killer application? What will a humanoid robot do that it is not cheaper/more effective to do with a real human, or cannot be done better with a specialised robot? Anything you can think of which is a humanoid robot performing a single physical action repeatedly, is wrong. It would need to be a series of tasks that keeps the robot highly busy, and the nature of the work needs to be somewhat unpredictable (otherwise use a dedicated robot). After all, humans are successful not because we do one thing well, but because we do many not-well defined things good-enough. This kind of generalisation is probably harder than all other AI problems, and likely requires massive advances in real-time learning, embodiment and intrinsic motivation. What we need sub-problems for robots, i.e. like a smart vacuum, where robots are slowly but surely introduced into complex environments where they can safely incrementally improve. Trying to crack self-driving 1+ tonne high speed death machines in your first attempt is insanity.
RAHIMUDEEN 2y ago
Big Mumbai
thefaux 2y ago
> Their imaginations were definitely encourage by exponentialism, but in fact all they knew was that when the went from smallish to largish networks following the architectural diagram above, the performance got much better. So the inherent reasoning was that if more made things better then more more would make things more better. Alas for them it appears that this is probably not the case. I recommend reading Richard Hamming's "The Art of Science and Engineering." Early in the book he presents a simple model of knowledge growth that always leads to an s-curve. The trouble is that on the left, an s-curve looks exponential. We still don't know where we are on the curve with any of the technologies. It is very possible we've already passed the exponential growth phase with some of these technologies. If so, we will need new technologies to move forward to the next s curve.
ripe 2y ago
On reading the negative commentary here on Rodney Brooks's post, I'm realizing that besides being a rambling article, it also assumes too much background from the reader. It isn't really understandable without knowing something about the author and about the business of robots. Disclaimer: I worked for years building robots, several of these years with Rod. I assure you, when it comes to robotics and AI, he knows what he's talking about. Here's my perspective. Also, he wrote his original predictions six years ago in a blog post [1], which is the basis for this latest post. If you don't have the time to read the old post, I provide a short summary from it about autonomous driving below, too. 1. Rod is not just an MIT professor emeritus and a past director of CSAIL. He has co-founded multiple robotics companies, one of which, iRobot, made loads of money selling tens of millions of consumer-grade autonomous robots cleaning floors in people's homes. Making money selling autonomous robots is a very, very difficult thing. Roomba was a true milestone. Before then, the only civilian, commercially successful mass-produced robots were the programmable industrial arms that are still used in auto manufacturing. If the author sounds self-important, maybe that's why. Yeah, he can get a little snarky sometimes when self-important CEOs run around with VC money in their pockets making tall claims and never being held accountable. That's just his style. Try to look beyond it. You might learn a thing or two. 2. The entire purpose of his annual "predictions" posts starting with [1] was to counter the hype and salesmanship about AI and robotics that's wasting billions of investment dollars and polluting the media landscape. About autonomous cars, he believes that the core technology has been demonstrated in the 1980s, but that instead of using it, we have squandered the decades since then. For autonomous robots, the interaction with their surroundings is critical to success. We could have enhanced our road and communications infrastructure to enable autonomous cars. Instead, we have chosen to give money to slick salesmen to chase the mirage of placing "intelligent" cars on existing roads, continuing to neglect our civil infrastructure. [1] https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/
bhelkey 2y ago
It is valuable to make predictions about the world, evaluate those predictions, and reflect on the quality of the predictions and what biases skewed those predictions. The key is to refine how one looks at the world. I don't see that in this article. Largely, I see the author trying to argue that he was right in 2018 rather than trying to take a step back to accurately evaluate their predictions.

243 points by timr 2y ago

I like Rodney Brooks, but I find the way he does these predictions to be very obtuse and subject to a lot of self-congratulatory interpretation. Highlighting something green that is "NET2021" and then saying he was right when something happened or didn't happen, when something related happened in 2024 mean that he predicted it right or wrong, or is everything subject to arbitrary interpretation? Where are the bold predictions? Sounds like a lot of fairly obvious predictions with a lot of wiggle room to determine if right or wrong.

gcr 2y ago
NET2021 means that he predicted that the event would take place on or after 2021, so happening in 2024 satisfies that. Keep in mind these are six-year-old predictions. Are you wishing that he had tighter confidence intervals?
- rexreed 2y ago
  If the predictions are meant to be bold, then yes. If they're meant to be fairly obvious, then no. For example, saying that flying cars will be in widespread use NET 2025 is not much of a prediction. I think we can all say that if flying cars will be in widespread use, it will happen No Earlier Than 2025. It could happen in 2060, and that NET 2025 prediction would still be true. He could mark it green in 2026 and say he was right, that, yes, there are no flying cars, and so mark his scorecard another point in the correct column. But is that really a prediction? A bolder prediction would be, say "Within 1-2 yrs of XX". So what is Rodney Brooks really trying to predict and say? I'd rather read about what the necessary gating conditions are for something significant and prediction-worthy to occur, or what the intractable problems are that would make something not be possible within a predicted time, rather than reading about him complain about how much overhype and media sensation there is in the AI and robotics (and space) fields. Yes, there is, but that's not much of a prediction or statement either, as it's fairly obvious. There's also a bit of an undercurrent of complaint in this long article about how the not-as-sexy or hyped work he has done for all those years has gone relatively unrewarded and "undeserving types" are getting all the attention (and money). And as such, many of the predictions and commentary on them read more as rant than as prediction.
  - Denzel 2y ago
    Presumably you read the section where Brooks highlights all the forecasts executives were making in 2017? His NET predictions act as a sort of counter-prediction to those types of blind optimistic, overly confident assertions. In that context, I’d say his predictions are neither obvious nor lacking boldness when we have influential people running around claiming that AGI is here today, AI agents will enter the workforce this year, and we should be prepared for AI-enabled layoffs.
  - riffraff 2y ago
    The NET estimation is supposed to be a counter to the irrational exuberance of media and PR. E.g. musk says they'll get humans to Mars in 2020, and the counter is "I don't think that will happen until at least 2030".
kragen 2y ago
"NET2021" means "no earlier than 2021". So, if nothing even arguably similar happened until 2024, that sounds like a very correct prediction. Whether that's worth congratulating him about depends on how obvious it was, but I think you really need to measure "fairly obvious" at the time the prediction is made, not seven years later. A lot of things that seem "fairly obvious" now weren't obvious at all then.

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? Rodney Brooks Predictions Scorecard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34477124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34477124 - Jan 2023 (41 comments) Predictions Scorecard, 2021 January 01 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706436 - Jan 2021 (12 comments) Predictions Scorecard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18889719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18889719 - Jan 2019 (4 comments)

sashank_1509 2y ago

Feels too self-congratulatory when he claims to be correct about self driving in the Waymo case. The bar he set is so broad and ambiguous, that probably anything Waymo did, would not qualify as self driving to him. So he think humans are intervening once every 1-2 miles to train the Waymo, we’re not even sure if that is true, I heard from friends that it was 100+ miles but let us say Waymo comes out and says it is 1000 miles. Then I bet Rodney can just fiddle with goal post and say that 3.26 trillion miles were driven in US in 2024, and having a human intervene 1000 miles would mean 3.26 billion interventions, and that this is clearly not self driving. In fact until Waymo disables Internet on all cars and prices it never needs any intervention ever, Rodney can claim he’s right, even then maybe not stopping exactly where Rodney wanted it to, might be proof that self driving doesn’t work. Next big thing after deep learning prediction is clearly false. LLM is deep learning, scaled up, we are not in any sense looking past deep learning. Rodney I bet wanted it to be symbolic AI, but that is most likely a dead end, and the bitter lesson actually holds. In fact we have been riding this deep learning wave since Alex-Net 2012. OpenAI talked about scaling since 2016 and during that time the naysayers could be very confident and claim we needed something more, but OpenAI went ahead and proved out the scaling hypothesis and passed the language Turing test. We haven’t needed anything more except scale and reasoning has also turned out to be similar. Just an LLM trained to reason, no symbolic merger, not even a search step it seems like.

mvdtnz 2y ago
Your objection to him claiming a win on self driving is that you think that we can still define cars as self driving even when humans are operating them? Ok I disagree. If humans are operating them then they simply are not self driving by any sensible definition.
- sashank_1509 2y ago
  Human interventions are some non zero number in current self driving cars and will likely be that way for a while. Does this mean self driving is a scam and in fact it is just a human driving, and that these are actually ADAS. Maybe in some pedantic sense, you are right but then your definition is not useful, since it lumps cruise control/ lane-keeping ADAS and Waymo’s in the same category. Waymo is genuinely, qualitatively a big improvement above any ADAS/ self driving system that we have seen. I suspect Rodney did not predict even Waymo’s to be possible, but gave himself enough leeway so that he can pedantically argue that Waymo’s are just ADAS and that his prediction was right.

_yb2s 2y ago

It seems to me that the redefined flying cars for extremely wealthy people did happen? eVTOLs are being sold/delivered to the general public. Certainly still pretty rare, as I've never seen one in real life. I'd love to have one but would probably hate a world where everyone has them. Not really wanting to have this argument a second time in a week (seriously- just look at my past comments instead of replying here as I said all I care to say https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42588699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42588699), but he is totally wrong about LLMs just looking up answers in their weights- they can correctly answer questions about totally fabricated new scenarios, such as solving simple physics questions that require tracking the location of objects and reporting where they will likely end up based on modeling the interactions involved. If you absolutely must reply that I am wrong at least try it yourself first in a recent model like GPT-4o and post the prompt you tried.

laweijfmvo 2y ago
Kobe Bryant basically commuted by helicopter, when it was convenient. It may have even taken off and landed at his house, but probably not exactly at all of his destinations. Is a “flying car” fundamentally that much different?
- _yb2s 2y ago
  I think the difference is that a helicopter is extremely technical to fly requiring complex and expensive training, and the eVTOL is supposed to be extremely simple to fly. Also the eVTOL in principle is really cheap to make if you just consider the materials and construction costs- probably eventually much cheaper than a car. I was curious so I looked up how much you can buy the cheapest new helicopters for, and they are cheaper than an eVTOL right now- the XE composite is $68k new, and things like that can be ~25k used. I'm shocked one can in principle own a working helicopter for less than the price of a 7 year old Toyota Camry.
  - xarope 2y ago
    But I'm sure running costs (aviation fuel), hanger costs, maintenance costs, cost to maintain pilot license are far more expensive, compared to driving a car.

Animats 2y ago

> That being said, we are not on the verge of replacing and eliminating humans in either white collar jobs or blue collar jobs. Tell that to someone laid off when replaced by some "AI" system. > Waymo not autonomous enough It's not clear how often Waymo cars need remote attention, but it's not every 1-2 miles. Customers would notice the vehicle being stopped and stuck during the wait for customer service. There are many videos of people driving in Waymos for hours without any sign of a situation that required remote intervention. Tesla and Baidu do use remote drivers. The situations where Waymo cars get stuck are now somewhat obscure cases. Yesterday, the new mayor of SF had two limos double-parked, and a Waymo got stuck behind that. A Waymo got stuck in a parade that hadn't been listed on Muni's street closure list. > Flying cars Probably at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. They won't be cost-effective, but it will be a cool demo. EHang recently put solid state batteries into their flying car and got 48 minutes of flight time, instead of their previous 25 minutes. Ehang is basically a scaled-up quadrotor drone, with 16 motors and props. EHang been flying for years, but not for very long per recharge. Better batteries will help a lot. [1] https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/electric-air-taxi-flights-in-los-angeles-during-the-2028-summer-olympics/ https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/electric-air-taxi-flights-...

shlomo_z 2y ago
> Tell that to someone laid off when replaced by some "AI" system. What are some good examples? I am very skeptical of anyone losing their jobs to AI. People are getting laid off for various reasons: - Companies are replacing American tech jobs with foreigners - Many companies hired more devs than they need - companies hired many devs during the pandemic, and don't need them anymore Some companies may claim they are replacing devs with AI. I take it with a grain of salt. I believe some devs were probably replaced by AI, but not a large amount. I think there may be a lot more layoffs in the future, but AI will probably account for a very small fraction of those.
- theLiminator 2y ago
  I imagine there aren't really layoffs, but slowing/stopping of hiring as you get more productivity out of existing devs. I imagine in the future, lots of companies will just let their employee base slowly attrition away.

vikrantrathore 2y ago

For me this predictions are kind of being aware of how progress can happen based on history, but this will not lead to any breakthrough. I am not in the camp of being skeptic so I still like the hype cycle, they create an environment for people to break the boundaries and sometimes help untested ideas and things to be explored. This might not have happen if there is no hype cycle. I am in the camp of people who are positive as George Bernard Shaw in his 2 quotes: 1. A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. 2. The reasonable person adapts themselves to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person. (Changed man to person as I feel it should be gender neutral) In hindsight when we look back, everything looks like we anticipated, so predictions are no different some pans out some doesn't. My feeling after reading prediction scorecard is that you need a right balance between risk averse (who are either doubtful or do not have faith things will happen quickly enough) and risk takers (one who is extremely positive) for anything good to happen. Both help humanity to move forward and are necessary part of nature. It is possible AGI might replace humans in a short term and then new kind of work emerges and humans again find something different. There is always a disruption with new changes and some survive and some can't, even if nothing much happens its worth trying as said in quote 1.

sgt101 2y ago
I feel a counter is that hyping and going along with hype leads to substantial misallocation of capital and this leads to human misery. How much money has been burned on robo-taxis which could have been spent on incubators for kids.

zzzeek 2y ago

what a weird writer, lots of interesting things to talk about but this very long essay continued to circle back to being author-self-obsessed with their own prowess and drawing out huge expositions and bullet lists on how well they are at predicting things. Call it self-referential-appeal-to-authority.

mberning 2y ago
It is odd. The product of a mind which clearly thinks very highly of itself.
fifticon 2y ago
Another perspective is that it is a person who takes great care/is very thorough, to examine and re-evaluate his reasonings, and makes an effort to explain the logic in his reasoning, which can be helpful if you are trying to figure out if you agree or disagree.

ynniv 2y ago

It's long, so I'm skimming a little and... flying cars. If you don't know why we don't have flying cars, you're not a good engineer. It really doesn't matter what prestigious lab you ran, as that apparently didn't impart the ability to think critically about engineering problems. [Hint: Flying takes 10x the energy of driving, and the cost/weight/volume of 1 MJ hasn't changed in close to a hundred years. Flying cars require a 10x energy breakthrough.]

anon7000 2y ago
The article is not optimistic on flying cars. The prediction is that an expensive flying car could be purchased no earlier than 2036, and notes a strong possibility that it won’t even happen by 2050. Plus states that minor success (aka 0.1% of car sales are flying cars) isn’t going to happen in his lifetime. The author also expands on this: > Don’t hold your breath. They are not here. They are not coming soon. > Nothing has changed. Billions of dollars have been spent on this fantasy of personal flying cars. It is just that, a fantasy, largely fueled by spending by billionaires. It’s worth actually reading the article before trashing someone’s career and engineering skills!
- ynniv 2y ago
  Engineering is about focusing on what matters. There's no point in talking about flying cars: they will exist when portable fusion exists, so just talk about that.
  - cudgy 2y ago
    So you are saying that a true engineer doesn’t read articles and criticizes a successful engineer that wrote said article with hand-wavy arguments?
tsimionescu 2y ago
The article is responding to claims by CEOs of car companies, industry and business press, and other hype sources that keep predicting flying cars next year or so. It's predicting that, against this hype, it will not come to pass. Not sure why you've worded your comment in such a way as if the article was hyping up flying cars. Not to mention, since we do have helicopters, the engineering challange of flying cars is almost entirely unrelated to energy costs (at least for the super rich, the equivalent of, say, a Rolls Royce, not of a Toyota). The thing stopping flying cars from existing is that it is extremely hard to make an easy to pilot flying vehicle, given the numerous degrees of freedom (and potential catastrophic failure modes); and the significantly higher impredictability and variance of the medium (air vs road surface). Plus, the major problem of noise pollution, which gets to extreme levels for somewhat fundamental reasons (you have to diaplace a whole lot of air to fly; which is very close to having to create sound waves). So, overall, the energy problem is already fixed, we already have point-to-point flying vehicles usable, and occasionally used, in urban areas, helicopters. Making them safe when operated by a very lightly trained pilot, and silent enough to not wake up a neighborhood, are the real issues that will persist even if we had mini fusion reactors.

IAmGraydon 2y ago

Does it drive anyone else crazy when an author posts 15,000 words (yes, there are that many in this article) when 1,500 would have more than communicated the relevant information? The length of this article is almost comical.

andyferris 2y ago

So... he's not a fan of Elon Musk, I take it?

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richrichie 2y ago

> It distorts where VC money goes, always to something that promises impossibly large payoffs–it seems it is better to have an untested idea that would have an enormous payoff than a tested idea which can get to a sustainable business But this is the whole point of VC investing. It is not normal distribution investing.

kookamamie 2y ago

It's far too rambly and vague to make any sense of the achieved results, I think.

lalaithion 2y ago

> A robot that has any real idea about its own existence, or the existence of humans in the way that a six year old understands humans It seems to me we’re at the very least close to this, unless you hold unproven beliefs about grey matter vs silicon.

kqr 2y ago

> 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 Technically true but I'm not convinced it matters that much. The reason autonomation took over in manufacturing was not that they could fire the operator entirely, but that one operator could man 8 machines simultaneously instead of just one.

SavageBeast 2y ago

In reading this I come to wonder if the current advances in "AI" are going to follow the Self Driving Car model. Turns out the 80% is relatively easy to do, but the remaining 20% to get it right is REALLY hard.

brisky 2y ago
Agree, that is why the agent hype is going to bust. Agent means giving AI control. That means critical failure modes and the need of human to constantly oversee agent working.

zetalyrae 2y ago

> LLMs have proved amazing facile with language. If you took a transcript of a conversation with Claude 3.6 Sonnet, and sent it back in time even five years ago (just before the GPT-3 paper was published), nobody would believe it was real. They would say that it was fake, or that it was witchcraft. And whoever believed it was real would instantly acknowledge that the Turing test had been passed. This refusal to update beliefs on new evidence is very tiresome.

tkgally 2y ago
Similarly if you could let a person from five years ago have a spoken conversation with ChatGPT Advanced Voice mode or Gemini Live. For me five years ago, the only giveaways that the voice on the other end might not be human would have been its abilities to answer questions instantaneously about almost any subject and to speak many different languages. The NotebookLM “podcasters” would have been equally convincing to me.
harvodex 2y ago
The whole point of the post is that many have updated their beliefs too much.

coderintherye 2y ago

Good example of everything that can wrong with a prediction market if left unchecked. Don't like that Waymo broke your prediction? Fine just move your goalposts. Like that prediction came true but on the wrong timeframe? Just move the goal posts. Glad Polymarket (and other related markets) exist so they can put actual goal posts in place with mechanisms that require certain outcomes in order to finalize on a prediction result.

sashank_1509 2y ago
Well said, shows even the most accomplished humans have the same biases as the rest of us when not held accountable
littlestymaar 2y ago
> Glad Polymarket (and other related markets) exist so Polymarket is a great way to incentive people into making their predictions happen, with all clandestine tools at their disposal, which is definitely not what you want for your society generally.
HDThoreaun 2y ago
Polymarket suffers from the same problem. This market https://polymarket.com/event/ethereum-etf-approved-by-may-31/ethereum-etf-approved-by-may-31?tid=1736539665436 https://polymarket.com/event/ethereum-etf-approved-by-may-31... was resolved in an extremely contentious way.

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lifeisstillgood 2y ago

>>> [self driving cars are rmeote controlled] in all cases so far deployed, humans monitoring those cars from a remote location, and occasionally sending control inputs to the cars. Wait, What now? I have never heard this, but from the founder of CSAIL I am going to take it as a statement of fact and proof that basically every AI company is flat out lying. I mean the difference between remote piloting a drone that has some autonomous flying features (which they do to handle lag etc) and remote driving a car is … semantics? But yeah it’s just moving jobs from one location to another.

tsimionescu 2y ago
Note that even the examples he gives are related to things like an operator telling the car to overtake a stopped truck instead of waiting for it to start again. So occasional high level decisions, not minute-to-minute or even second-to-second interactions like you have when flying a drone. This is more like telling your units to go somewhere in a video game, and they mostly do it right, but occasionally you have to take a look and help them because they got stuck in a particularly narrow corridor or something.
RamblingCTO 2y ago
Nitpick: he's not the founder, not by far. He's just a past director of CSAIL

Over2Chars 2y ago

I am always a fan of people who pretend to have psychic powers. Predict the future, Mr. Brooks!

barnabyjones 2y ago

>Individually owned cars can go underground onto a pallet and be whisked underground to another location in a city at more than 100mph. I'm curious where this idea even came from, not sure who the customer would be, it's a little disappointing he doesn't mention mag-lev trains in a discussion about future rapid transit. I'd much rather ride a smooth mag-lev across town than an underground pallet system.

qwertox 2y ago
Yet such an underground system should exist to transport deliveries.
kweingar 2y ago
Elon Musk promised to build this tech.

qznc 2y ago

If someone wants to have a credible prediction scorecard, get it on some third-party platform like Metaculus, Manifold, GJOpen, Polymarket, ...

maverickmax90 2y ago

What you marked as hype is a flaw in your skill to recognize real world cases vs wishful thinking. You are not predicting just daydreaming.

FabHK 2y ago

LOL about the last paragraphs: > Let’s Continue a Noble Tradition! > The billionaire founders of both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin had faith in the systems they had created. They both personally flew on the first operational flights of their sub-orbital launch systems. They went way beyond simply talking about how great their technology was, they believed in it, and flew in it. > Let’s hope this tradition continues. Let’s hope the billionaire founder/CEO of SpaceX will be onboard the first crewed flight of Starship to Mars, and that it happens sooner than I expect. We can all cheer for that.

tontonius 2y ago
How am I supposed to read this ? a thinly veiled hatred for Mr. Musk?
- FabHK 2y ago
  That's how I interpreted it, yes.

teractiveodular 2y ago

All that verbiage about robotaxis and not a single mention about China, which by all accounts is well ahead of the US in deploying them out on the road. (With a distinctly mixed track record, it must be said, but still.)

yearesadpeople 2y ago

Quite an unreadable web page, and somehow rationalising there was 'everything before me', and 'everything after me' with regard technology and prediction. Unfortunate understanding of reality really.

sinuhe69 2y ago

I always have a definitional problem with predictions. I mean, it's moot whether a specific prediction is right or wrong as long as it doesn't help us to understand the big picture and the trends. Take, for example, the prediction about "robots can autonomously navigate all US households". Why all? From the business POV, 80% of the market is "all" in a practical sense, and most people will consider navigation around the home as "solved" if they can do it for the majority of households and with virtually no intervention. Hilarious situations will arise that amuse the folks; video of clumsy robots will flood the internet instead of cats and dogs, but for the business site, it's lucrative enough to produce and sell them en masse. Another question of interest is how is the trend? What will the approximate cost of such a robot be? How many US households will adopt such a robot by which time, as they have adopted washing machines and dishwashers. Will we see a linear adoption or rather a logistic adoption? These are the more interesting questions than just whether I'm right or wrong.

nurettin 2y ago

I don't know the motivation behind making robotics and AI predictions, as these things have been done to death since the 70s, but I know people who bet for high inflation made a killing in financial futures.

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Upvoter33 2y ago

The next big thing beyond deep learning being LLMs is funny

michaelbuckbee 2y ago

One interesting prediction category in the Venn diagram overlaps of Rodney's predictions that is missing is drone deliveries. Where I live (in suburbia Virginia), we now can get items from the local WalMart grocery via DroneUp, which kind of blows mind.

sashank_1509 2y ago
Wow I had no idea progress was being made in this front

skizm 2y ago

I don't have a pulse on how far self-driving has come from a tech standpoint, but from an outsider's perspective I'd say it is "achieved" when I can order a self-driving car from an app in all of the top 10 most populated cities in the US (since that's where it is being developed) with as much consistency as uber/lyft. The real final boss for self-driving will be the government red-tape that companies will need to get through. I doubt local governments will be a laissez faire with self-driving as they were with uber being an illegal taxi company.

metalliqaz 2y ago
the final boss will be the first big lawsuit against a manufacturer for liability after someone is killed by a driverless car Of course, then we will eventually see infrastructure become even more hostile to non-drivers and people will have to sue their own governments for the right to exist in public without paying transport companies. Strong Towns tried to warn us
- skizm 2y ago
  Didn’t that already happen in Phoenix? They paused the program there, but unsure if there was actually a lawsuit or settlement.
  - metalliqaz 2y ago
    Wasn't there a human "monitor" in the car?
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      There was, but the reality is that the modern US regulatory environment demonstrably doesn't care whether cars labled as self driving are actually capable of that safely, and have not demonstrated any interest in regulating such, and that was BEFORE we popularly elected a group of charlatans, hacks, and grifters that have all made "The courts will bend over backwards for us and our wealth" a huge part of America. Like, Reagan's instructions to the regulatory agencies to basically stand down was only just beginning to be undone after 40 years, and we immediately elected the people promising to slam hard in the other direction. America will be a regulatory free for all for business for decades.

bArray 2y ago

> The level of hype about AI, Machine Learning and Robotics completely distorts people’s understanding of reality. It distorts where VC money goes, always to something that promises impossibly large payoffs–it seems it is better to have an untested idea that would have an enormous payoff than a tested idea which can get to a sustainable business, but does not change the world for ever. One thing to remember is that there is more than one target audience in these claims. VCs for example seem to operate on a rough principle of 5 tech companies, 4 make 0x and one makes 10x, for a total 2x on each investment. If you only promise 5x, with 4 failures of 0x and one success at 5x, total return is 1x on each (not worth the risk). You may say "yes, my company is 2x, but it is guaranteed!" - but they all sell this idea. VCs could be infinitely good at predicting success and great companies, but it's based on partial information. Essentially companies have to promise the 10x and the VCs assume they are likely incorrect anyway, in order to balance the risk profile. I do have a fundamental problem with this "infinite growth" model that almost everything seems based on. > There is steady growth in sales but my prediction of 30% of US car sales being electric by 2027 now seems wildly optimistic. We need two doublings to get there in three years and the doubling rate seems more like one doubling in four to five years. Even one doubling in 4-5 years might be too much. There are fundamental issues to be addressed: 1. What do we do about crashed EVs? They are dangerous to store and dangerous to dismantle. There have been quite a few EV fires at places like Copart now. There is little to no value in crashed EVs because they are so dangerous, which pushes insurance up because they cannot recover these funds. 2. Most car dealerships in the UK refuse to accept EVs for trade-in, because they sit on their forecourt until they eventually die. Those who can afford EVs typically get them on finance when the batteries provide the fullest range. Nobody I know is buying 10 year old EVs with no available replacement batteries. Commerical fleets are also not buying any more EVs as they essentially get no money back after using them for 3 years or so. 3. The electrical grid cannot scale to handle EVs. With every Western country decarbonising their electrical grid in favour of renewable energy, they have zero ability to respond to increased load. The truth is, when they push to remove fossil fuel vehicles, they simply want to take your personal transport from you. There is no plan for everybody to maintain personal mobility, it'll be a privilege reserved for the rich. You'll be priced out and put onto public transport, where there will be regular strikes because the government is broke and wages cannot increase - because who knew, infinite growth is a terrible investment model. > The other thing that has gotten over hyped in 2024 is humanoids robots. > The visual appearance of a robot makes a promise about what it can do and how smart it is. The real sin is not HRI issues, it's that we simply cannot justify them. What job is a humanoid robot supposed to do? Who is going to be buying tens of thousands of the first unit? What is the killer application? What will a humanoid robot do that it is not cheaper/more effective to do with a real human, or cannot be done better with a specialised robot? Anything you can think of which is a humanoid robot performing a single physical action repeatedly, is wrong. It would need to be a series of tasks that keeps the robot highly busy, and the nature of the work needs to be somewhat unpredictable (otherwise use a dedicated robot). After all, humans are successful not because we do one thing well, but because we do many not-well defined things good-enough. This kind of generalisation is probably harder than all other AI problems, and likely requires massive advances in real-time learning, embodiment and intrinsic motivation. What we need sub-problems for robots, i.e. like a smart vacuum, where robots are slowly but surely introduced into complex environments where they can safely incrementally improve. Trying to crack self-driving 1+ tonne high speed death machines in your first attempt is insanity.

RAHIMUDEEN 2y ago

Big Mumbai

thefaux 2y ago

> Their imaginations were definitely encourage by exponentialism, but in fact all they knew was that when the went from smallish to largish networks following the architectural diagram above, the performance got much better. So the inherent reasoning was that if more made things better then more more would make things more better. Alas for them it appears that this is probably not the case. I recommend reading Richard Hamming's "The Art of Science and Engineering." Early in the book he presents a simple model of knowledge growth that always leads to an s-curve. The trouble is that on the left, an s-curve looks exponential. We still don't know where we are on the curve with any of the technologies. It is very possible we've already passed the exponential growth phase with some of these technologies. If so, we will need new technologies to move forward to the next s curve.

ripe 2y ago

On reading the negative commentary here on Rodney Brooks's post, I'm realizing that besides being a rambling article, it also assumes too much background from the reader. It isn't really understandable without knowing something about the author and about the business of robots. Disclaimer: I worked for years building robots, several of these years with Rod. I assure you, when it comes to robotics and AI, he knows what he's talking about. Here's my perspective. Also, he wrote his original predictions six years ago in a blog post [1], which is the basis for this latest post. If you don't have the time to read the old post, I provide a short summary from it about autonomous driving below, too. 1. Rod is not just an MIT professor emeritus and a past director of CSAIL. He has co-founded multiple robotics companies, one of which, iRobot, made loads of money selling tens of millions of consumer-grade autonomous robots cleaning floors in people's homes. Making money selling autonomous robots is a very, very difficult thing. Roomba was a true milestone. Before then, the only civilian, commercially successful mass-produced robots were the programmable industrial arms that are still used in auto manufacturing. If the author sounds self-important, maybe that's why. Yeah, he can get a little snarky sometimes when self-important CEOs run around with VC money in their pockets making tall claims and never being held accountable. That's just his style. Try to look beyond it. You might learn a thing or two. 2. The entire purpose of his annual "predictions" posts starting with [1] was to counter the hype and salesmanship about AI and robotics that's wasting billions of investment dollars and polluting the media landscape. About autonomous cars, he believes that the core technology has been demonstrated in the 1980s, but that instead of using it, we have squandered the decades since then. For autonomous robots, the interaction with their surroundings is critical to success. We could have enhanced our road and communications infrastructure to enable autonomous cars. Instead, we have chosen to give money to slick salesmen to chase the mirage of placing "intelligent" cars on existing roads, continuing to neglect our civil infrastructure. [1] https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

bhelkey 2y ago

It is valuable to make predictions about the world, evaluate those predictions, and reflect on the quality of the predictions and what biases skewed those predictions. The key is to refine how one looks at the world. I don't see that in this article. Largely, I see the author trying to argue that he was right in 2018 rather than trying to take a step back to accurately evaluate their predictions.