As you may know, roboticist Rodney Brooks has been publishing and systematically updating tech predictions every January 1st since 2018. He makes predictions in the following categories: (1) self driving cars, (2) robotics, AI , and machine learning, and (3) human space travel. Here's the link for 2025. I've got some Rodney Brooks stuff here on the Savanna, including, but not limited to, excerpts from earlier prediction.
In these excerpts he talks about where we are and where we aren't in a general way (coloring in the original):
I want to be clear, as there has been for almost seventy years now, there has been significant progress in Artificial Intelligence over the last decade. There are new tools and they are being applied widely in science and technology, and are changing the way we think about ourselves, and how to make further progress.
That being said, we are not on the verge of replacing and eliminating humans in either white collar jobs or blue collar jobs. Their tasks may shift in both styles of jobs, but the jobs are not going away. We are not on the verge of a revolution in medicine and the role of human doctors. We are not on the verge of the elimination of coding as a job. We are not on the verge of replacing humans with humanoid robots to do jobs that involve physical interactions in the world. We are not on the verge of replacing human automobile and truck drivers world wide. We are not on the verge of replacing scientists with AI programs.
Breathless predictions such as these have happened for seven decades in a row, and each time people have thought the end is in sight and that it is all over for humans, that we have figured out the secrets intelligence and it will all just scale. The only difference this time is that these expectations have leaked out into the world at large. [...]
Today I get asked about humanoid robots taking away people's jobs. In March 2023 I was at a cocktail party and there was a humanoid robot behind the bar making jokes with people and shakily (in a bad way) mixing drinks. A waiter was standing about 20 feet away silently staring at the robot with mouth hanging open. I went over and told her it was tele-operated. "Thank God" she said. (And I didn't need to explain what "tele-operated" meant). Humanoids are not going to be taking away jobs anytime soon (and by that I mean not for decades).
You, you people!, are all making fundamental errors in understanding the technologies and where their boundaries lie. Many of them will be useful technologies but their imagined capabilities are just not going to come about in the time frames the majority of the technology and prognosticator class, deeply driven by FOBAWTPALSL, think.
But this time it is different you say. This time it is really going to happen. You just don't understand how powerful AI is now, you say. All the early predictions were clearly wrong and premature as the AI programs were clearly not as good as now and we had much less computation back then. This time it is all different and it is for sure now.
I think we are a long way off from being able to for-real deploy humanoid robots which have even minimal performance to be useable and even further off from ones that have enough ROI for people want to use them for anything beyond marketing the forward thinking outlook of the buyer.
Despite this, many people have predicted that the cost of humanoid robots will drop exponentially as their numbers grow, and so they will get dirt cheap. I have seen people refer to the cost of integrated circuits having dropped so much over the last few decades as proof. Not so.
They are committing the sin of exponentialism in an obviously dumb way. As I explained above the first integrated circuits were far from working at the limits of physics of representing information. But today's robots use mechanical components and motors that are not too far at all from physics based limits, about mass, force, and energy. You can't just halve the size of a motor and have a robot lift the same sized payload. Perhaps you can halve it once to get rid of inefficiencies in current designs. Perhaps. But you certainly can't do it twice. Physical robots are not ripe for exponential cost reduction by burning wastes in current designs. And it won't happen just because we start (perhaps) mass producing humanoid robots (oh, but the way, I already did this a decade ago-see my parting shot below). We know that from a century of mass producing automobiles. They did not get exponentially cheaper, except in the computing systems. Engines still have mass and still need the same amount of energy to accelerate good old fashioned mass.
Brooks has a couple of paragraphs on the SpaceX Starship. This is the next to the last of those (my highlighting):
This is the vehicle that the CEO of SpaceX recently said would be launched to Mars and attempt a soft landing there. He also said that if successful the humans would fly to Mars on it in 2030. These are enormously ambitious goals just from a maturity of technology standpoint. The real show stopper however may be human physiology as evidence accumulates that humans would not survive three years (the minimum duration of a Mars mission, due to orbital mechanics) in space with current shielding practices and current lack of gravity on board designs. Those two challenges may take decades, or even centuries to overcome (recall that Leonardo Da Vinci had designs for flying machines that took centuries to be developed...).
If and when we produce AGI-level AIs and robots, perhaps they'll take over the space travel mission, as I've recently suggested in a conversation with Claude 3.5. I've also published an excerpt from that conversation over at 3 Quarks Daily. At the moment I can imagine a future in which humans regularly spend time in near earth orbit, and perhaps we'll have a few on the Moon, but their presence there will be more ritual than practical. Maybe robots and AIs will have a permanent presence on Mars, and perhaps other planets as well. And perhaps we'll have Jeff Bezos's rotating cities as well. If one of them is near Mars, people can travel back and forth between it and Mars. But that's a long way off.
