Rodney Brooks

Feel free to ask for more details if you have specific questions! I worked in robotics for many years, I have some decent familiarity with this space. Here’s some more detailed thoughts “for free”:

Humanoid robotics are largely a publicity stunt. Our actuators, sensors, and algorithms are better adapted to other form factors. The nice thing about humanoids is that you (in theory) don’t have to change the interface, since they can use the same interface humans can use. In practice that doesn’t hold well, because we don’t have great force/pressure sensors to cover large areas like human skin. Likewise, it’s difficult to apply the fine forces that are sometimes needed (grabbing an egg, moving a joystick, etc). And there’s risk of the robot doing something unpredictable, so you always have to set a good safety bound around it anyways. In the end it’s often better to adapt the process to modern robotics, rather than the other way around.

There are many good practitioners that write about these and other limitations, I think Rodney Brooks has some good discussion of it, eg. https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/

Home assistance and nursing assistant jobs require competence in a large number of highly varied tasks and many require human-style intelligence which is among the hardest to automate from our experience with AI research. (See Moravec’s Paradox.)

It will be at least a couple decades, likely longer, until we can really automate those jobs cost effectively, which gives us time to reconfigure socio-economic systems to suit the burgeoning new industrial revolution.

Check out the following predictions by a noted roboticist and former director of MIT’s CSAIL

https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

Example from the page:

Dexterous robot hands generally available. NET (Not Earlier Than) 2030

It will take at least a decade and often longer for a hardware product to become affordable to the masses. So we are talking about 2040 or later when most of home caring jobs will be at risk.

Even then, the need for human interaction will still be there so it is unclear if most elderly would not want human services if it is accessible to them.

> best products

Agreed, somewhat, but you are conflating "product" and "architecture". I specifically meant architecture.

Intel was usually at least one process generation ahead of competitors, and often more than that. With Moore's law still going at full tilt, that meant not only more transistors, but also faster transistors, completely overwhelming the architectural deficits.

> occasional superior alternatives but "often" is kinda silly

Hmm...just off the top of my head: Motorola 68K, MicroVAX, LSI-11, SPARC, AMD 29K, Power, RISC, MIPS, Transputer, Alpha, HP-PA, ARM for desktop, Motorola 88K, Fairchild Clipper, etc.

I'd be hard-pressed to name an architecture that wasn't superior to i386. But architecture did not matter. With Moore's law no longer also getting us faster transistors, it might matter again: https://rodneybrooks.com/the-end-of-moores-law/

Perhaps change the headline to say famed roboticist == Rodney Brooks... because that matters. A lot.

And I do agree with him. Today's humanoid robots are poorer than any task compared to other, specific / single-purpose robots. And they are more expensive. And they don't generalize. All humanoid companies are burning their $$$$ for sake of cute stories. None of the companies today are revenue generating, let alone profitable.

Perhaps in a decade or longer, when we have better, more robust vision-multi-modal-action models we will have humanoid-ish robots that are actually valuable. And these too are unlikely to be human-like.

Brooks's essay is worth reading in full: https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/

Who do you have in mind? In my corner of AI it's pretty uncommon for researchers to even predict "timelines". Predictions have a bad track record in the field and most researchers know it, so don't like to go on record making them. The only prominent AI researcher I know who has made a bunch of predictions with dates is Rodney Brooks [1], and he puts even dog-level general intelligence as "not earlier than 2048". I imagine folks like LeCun or Hinton are more optimistic, but as far as I'm aware they haven't wanted to make specific predictions with dates like that (and LeCun doesn't like the term "AGI", because he doesn't think "general intelligence" exists even for humans).

[1] https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

Rodney brooks would disagree with you: https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-01/

> Now self driving cars means that there is no one in the drivers seat, but there may well be, and in all cases so far deployed, humans monitoring those cars from a remote location, and occasionally sending control inputs to the cars. The companies do not advertise this feature out loud too much, but they do acknowledge it, and the reports are that it happens somewhere between every one to two miles traveled