Nothing is ever as good as it first seems and nothing is ever as bad as it first seems.
— A best memory paraphrase of advice given to me by Vice Admiral Joe Dyer, former chief test pilot of the US Navy and former Commander of NAVAIR.
[You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks]
Table of contents
Introduction What I Nearly Got Wrong What Has Surprised Me, And That I Missed 8 Years Ago My Color Scheme and Past Analysis My New Predictions Quantum Computers Self Driving Cars Humanoid Robots Neural Computation LLMs Self Driving Cars A Brief Recap of what "Self Driving" Cars Means and Meant My Own Experiences with Waymo in 2025 Self Driving Taxi Services __Cruise __Tesla __Waymo __Zoox Electric Cars Flying Cars Robotics, AI, and Machine Learning Capabilities and Competences World Models Situatedness vs Embodiment Dexterous Hands Human Space Flight Orbital Crewed Flights Suborbital Crewed Flights Boeing's Starliner SpaceX Falcon 9 NASA, Artemis, and Returning to the Moon SpaceX Starship Blue Origin Gets to Orbit New Space Stations Addendum
Introduction
This is my eighth annual update on how my dated predictions from January 1st, 2018 concerning (1) self driving cars, (2) robotics, AI , and machine learning, and (3) human space travel, have held up. I promised then to review them at the start of the year every year until 2050 (right after my 95th birthday), thirty two years in total. The idea was to hold myself accountable for those predictions. How right or wrong was I?
The summary is that my predictions held up pretty well, though overall I was a little too optimistic. That is a little ironic, as I think that many people who read my predictions back on January 1st, 2018 thought that I was very pessimistic compared to the then zeitgeist. I prefer to think of myself as being a realist.
And did I see LLMs coming? No and yes. Yes, I did say that something new and big that everyone accepted as the new and big thing in AI would come along no earlier than 2023, and that the key paper for its success had already been written by before I made my first predictions. And indeed LLMs were generally accepted as the next big thing in 2023 (I was lucky on that date), and the key paper, Attention Is All You Need, was indeed already written, and had first appeared in June of 2017. I wrote about this extensively in last year’s scorecard. But no, I had no idea it would be LLMs at the time of my correct prediction that something big would appear. And that lack of specificity on the details of exactly what will be invented and when is the case with all my predictions from the first day of 2018.
I did not claim to be clairvoyant about exactly what would happen, rather I was making predictions about the speed of new research ideas, the speed of hype generation, the speed of large scale deployments of new technologies, and the speed of fundamental changes propagating through the world’s economy. Those speeds are very different and driven by very different realities. I think that many people get confused by that and make the mistake of jumping between those domains of reality, thinking all the speeds will be the same. In my case my estimates of those speeds are informed by watching AI and robotics professionally, for 42 years at the time of my predictions. I became a graduate student in Artificial Intelligence in January of 1976, just shy of 20 years after the initial public outing of the term Artificial Intelligence at the summer workshop in 1956 at Dartmouth. And now as of today I have been in that field for 50 years.
... continue reading