House Cleaning My January 1, 2018 Predictions – Rodney Brooks
Rodney Brooks
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House Cleaning My January 1, 2018 Predictions
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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 for predicted events are getting sparser, and at the same time many things have gone in different directions than where everyone believed the would go eight and a half years ago. I will also bring into play the five new directional predictions I made a year ago and first included in my annual update at the start of this year. The long, long tables from previous posts are heading out the door with this post.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF My PREDICTIONS
The acronyms I used for predictions in my original post were as follows.
NET year means it will not happen before that year (No Earlier Than)
BY year means I predict that it will happen by that year.
NIML , Not In My Lifetime, i.e., not before 2050.
As time passes mentioned years I color then as accurate, too pessimistic, or too optimistic
18 months ago I added hemming and hawing. This is for when something looks just like what I said would take a lot longer than has happened, but the underlying achievement is not what everyone expected, and is not what was delivered. People may be happy with what was delivered but it was not was promised. So when I put further out predictions for things that haven’t happened the way everyone was saying they would happen, I do want to claim accuracy in my predictions.
Here are two examples.
1. When everyone was promising self driving taxi services they were saying that the cars would drive themselves. Waymo appears to have delivered this, but in fact it has three separate crews of humans who intervene with the cars while they are driving. There are customer agents you can call through a system in the car to report failures of all sorts. There is a separate set of people who can give the cars commands, such as "ignore the lack of a green signal, as I can see from the images that the power is out", or "stop trying to turn right, and instead turn left". (Bystanders have no way to communicate with the cars as they do with human driven cars, so there is no car/bystander cooperation.) And then there are gig workers using the Honk app, who sign up to go shut a door left open in a car, or take care of other details the car cannot do itself. [[I contrast that with my own company Robust AI where we have mobile robots deployed all over North America, and we have no remote operations or communications with those robots (for those that the customers do not insist on air gapping we do receive reports from the robots which helps spot operational problems). They just work. But anyone in the warehouse or factory where they are deployed can grab them (either their bodies or their force multiplying handlebar) and redirect them should they wish.]]
2. When I talked about flying cars it was the old fashioned idea that they would be things that could drive on a road and fly in the air. Over the past eight and a half years that definition has changed and they have become multi-rotor electric helicopters that take off and land vertically. And they have no wheels and can not move at all once on the ground. BUT, there are not even any of them in commercial service yet. There is one company that has a single seater that you need many days of training to use, and the CEO of that company told me in March that they had had six sales at four million dollars a piece to wealthy individuals. And watching one take off made me feel seasick.
Overview of My 2018 Predictions
Below I have edited down the generations of long, long tables to be shorter and sweeter and easier to read on a small device. Each of the three tables has the original predictions with their original dates. The colored dates with asterisks have been incrementally...