Top all-time · #496
Rodney Brooks
Personal blog · rodneybrooks.comaihardwarescience
Rodney Brooks's personal blog at rodneybrooks.com covers ai, hardware and science. Since 2017, 117 different Hacker News readers have linked it 209 times, most often “Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite his dated predictions and essays on robotics and AI, mostly to argue driverless cars and humanoids are years away. His ML history series is also pointed to as a primer.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Called valuable, a good source, seminal and a treasure trove; readers are told to check it out or read it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity10 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2025-09-27
- A Better Lesson9 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2019-03-20
- My Dated Predictions (2018)7 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-02-17
- Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 017 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-01-01
- The Origins of “Artificial Intelligence” (2018)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-04-28
- My Dated Predictions6 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-01-02
- The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-09-07
- Rodney Brooks: Predictions Scorecard, 2022 January 015 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-01-08
- Predictions Scorecard, 2024 January 015 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-01-02
- Bothersome Bystanders and Self Driving Cars – Rodney Brooks4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-07-04
What Hacker News says?
So going by https://rodneybrooks.com/rodney-brooks-three-laws-of-robotic... That would be violating the second design principle: "When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times." With a physical robot, if it fails and freezes, it turns into a hazard. With Clippy, it intrusively stops hum…
Comment linking /rodney-brooks-three-laws-of-robotics/
on “Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs”Submitted Patrick Winston Explains Deep Learning as a story · 292 points
HN discussionThat’s irrelevant though. If the system requires human intervention, then it’s not fully autonomous by definition. See https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-... for example: 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. That’s… not very autonomous.
Comment linking /predictions-scorecard-2025-january-01/
on “AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents”Submitted Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01 as a story · 243 points
HN discussionRodney Brooks? https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-...
Comment linking /predictions-scorecard-2025-january-01/
on “This is not the future”Submitted Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity as a story · 208 points
HN discussion> 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 b…
Comment linking /the-end-of-moores-law/
on “Is it time for open processors?”Submitted Peer Review as a story · 188 points
HN discussionI believe this way of understanding AI and its implications is quite sound, and it reminds me of Rodney Brooks' Productivity Gain[0] article, where he argues that we should focus on talking about "digitalization", instead of trendier buzz terms like AI or whatever is in vogue at the moment (the toll taker's job on the highway has not been replaced by a sophisticated robot, but rather by a transponder, along with the…
Comment linking /the-productivity-gain-where-is-it-coming-from-and-where-is-it-going-to/
on “We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis”Submitted Unexpected Consequences of Self-Driving Cars as a story · 183 points
HN discussion> Programmers suddenly need backup plans. Yup, Claude Opus 4.5 + Claude Code feels like its teetering right on the edge of Jevon's Paradox. It can't work alone, and it needs human design and code review, if only to ensure it understands the problem and produces maintainable code. But it can build very credible drafts of entire features based on a couple of hours of planning, then I can spend a day reading closely an…
Comment linking /why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/
on “If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?”Submitted How much things can change as a story · 152 points
HN discussion> If something appears “impossible” to you... there’s no information there about whether it is possible. I agree that an argument from personal incredulity is generally not a good one. But that doesn't mean we can't demonstrate that things are very unlikely to happen. E.g., there's good reason to think that perpetual motion machines are impossible. It's also important to realize that "possible" in a colloquial sense…
Comment linking /predictions-scorecard-2020-january-01/
on “Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'”Submitted Tips for Building and Deploying Robots as a story · 122 points
HN discussionI'm not saying they should not - I'm saying they have been slowly becoming infrastructure and a regulator should delay antitrust if they are building up more infrastructure for future technology - Rodney Brooks has been saying there needs to be improvements in the road networks for self driving to be sped up. Ctrl-F "raised pavement markers" http://rodneybrooks.com/agi-has-been-delayed/ I don't know if I'm right abo…
Comment linking /agi-has-been-delayed/
on “From Spain to Germany, farmers warn of fresh food shortages”Submitted The End of Moore’s Law as a story · 95 points
HN discussionWho 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…
Comment linking /my-dated-predictions/
on “John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round”Submitted The Origin of Robot Arm Programming Languages as a story · 74 points
HN discussionThis paper seems to pre-date behavior trees. Any comment on how TLA relates? (I skimmed but will give a closer look when I have more time.) I was curious what Brooks now thinks about subsumption and found this from a few months ago: The approach to controlling robots, the subsumption architecture that it proposed led directly to the Roomba, a robot vacuum cleaner, which with over 30 million sold is the most produced…
Comment linking /peer-review/
on “Open Problems in Robotics”Submitted AGI Has Been Delayed as a story · 69 points
HN discussionRodney Brooks (of iRobot fame) wrote an essay recently about why humanoids are likely decades and not years away from fulfilling their promise. It is quite long, but even a gpt summary will be quite valuable. https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... In short, he makes the case that unlike text and images, human dexterity is based on sensory inputs that we barely understand, that these robots d…
Comment linking /why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/
on “Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot”Submitted Steps Toward Super Intelligence Part I: How We Got Here as a story · 64 points
HN discussionYeah, very good points. To be fair there are people who have argued the big data side who have clearly solid knowledge of AI and are not just SV suits, for example I remember Yann LeCun in a debate with Christopher Manning, where Manning was arguing for the importance of "structure" and LeCun was arguing against it. Or see the "Bitter Lesson", mentioned in a parent comment. That may have become a total shibboleth of…
Comment linking /a-better-lesson/
on “Getting 50% (SoTA) on Arc-AGI with GPT-4o”Submitted Predictions Scorecard, 2021 January 01 as a story · 55 points
HN discussionhttps://rodneybrooks.com/a-better-lesson/ is an interesting retort to the Sutton post.
Comment linking /a-better-lesson/
on “OpenAI Codex”Submitted A Better Lesson as a story · 55 points
HN discussionThen that raises another interesting possibility: that absolutely nobody at the deranged-optimism companies knew what they were doing. Because there were definitely experts who knew those dates were impossible. Less 18 months after that Lyft prediction, roboticist and AI expert Rodney Brooks said that free-roaming auto-taxis wouldn't be running before 2035: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/
Comment linking /my-dated-predictions/
on “Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division”Submitted Robot Is A Hijacked Word as a story · 49 points
HN discussionSure! And that's a legitimate service to offer to some people. But that's part of the giant gap between true autonomous taxis and what Waymo has even claimed they're doing. I think the difference is important because people here frequently assume that true autonomous taxis will be here in short order. In contrast to experts who believe it is likely to be a decade or two away. E.g.: http://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-p…
Comment linking /my-dated-predictions/
on “Waymo teams up with Jaguar to intro a new, premium self-driving car”Submitted My Dated Predictions as a story · 48 points
HN discussion
