Roboticist Warns of Robot Bubble – CleanTechnica

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This is apparently Robot Sunday. We’ve got another robot story. And another bubble story.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about a potential (or expected) AI bubble, and combined that with some robot news. However, now we’ve got a separate story about a potential robot bubble.

Rodney Brooks is a famous roboticist. He was a cofounder of iRobot and he worked at MIT for decades in this field. He recently wrote an article titled “Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity.” He starts out the piece quite directly: “In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.”

This is not to say Brooks isn’t a believer in robots. Obviously, he is. He adds that, “At the end of the post, after I have completed my argument on this point, I have included two more short pieces. The first is on the problems still to be solved for two legged humanoid robots to be safe for humans to be near them when they walk. The second is how we will have plenty of humanoid robots fifteen years from now, but they will look like neither today’s humanoid robots nor humans.” Color me intrigued.

Naturally, at this point, you should probably just go read his piece. But I’m going to pull out a few more highlights.

• Brooks rolls through a brief history of robotic arms and AI.
• He points out that we are at the early stage of the hype cycle for humanoid robots, and also that AI is at the point where it’s dropping off the peaks of the hype cycle and about to crash into the doldrums.
• He notes the huge ambitions of the CEO of Figure, Mike Cagney, and the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, and bold claims they have made about humanoid robots and what their companies will do. His take on it is as follows: “In my opinion, believing that this will happen any time within decades is pure fantasy thinking. But many are predicting that it will happen in as soon as two years, and the more conservative hypenotists believe it will have significant economic impact within five years.” (I wonder what he thinks about Tesla Optimus solving poverty.)
• He then goes through humanoid robot history over the last several decades. He clearly has spent many years learning about, tracking, and influencing the efforts.
• He also discusses the matter of dexterity and efforts to build human-like hands.
• He talks neural networks, end-to-end learning, LLMs, and more.

Really, well, at this point, you should just go read his article. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read on this topic, as one would expect from an accomplished person who has been in the field for decades.