Rodney Brooks

Rodney Brooks (born 1954 in Adelaide, Australia) is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT, where he directed the CSAIL lab and upended the field in the 1980s with behavior-based “subsumption architecture” robots that acted in the world instead of reasoning about it. He co-founded iRobot — maker of the Roomba and military PackBot — then Rethink Robotics, and now serves as CTO of warehouse-robotics startup Robust.AI. Few people alive have shipped more actual robots.

The scorecard

On January 1, 2018, Brooks published dated predictions about AI, robotics and space, promising to grade himself publicly every New Year’s Day until 2050 — an exercise he began, he says, to inject some reality into irrational exuberance. The annual scorecard has become a ritual puncturing of both hype and doom: self-driving timelines slip, humanoid-robot revolutions stall, and AGI-any-day-now claims meet his estimate that human-level AI remains generations away.

He applies the same scalpel to the LLM era. People watch a model perform, he told TechCrunch in 2024, then wrongly generalize to competence it does not have — the technology is impressive, he says, but not human-like, and grafting human capabilities onto it is a category error. His prescription is characteristically an engineer’s: box systems in, deploy where the environment is controlled, and expect a long tail of failures to take decades to fix.

Yet Brooks is no pessimist about the technology itself — he has spent fifty years building it, argues robots are essential for aging societies, and keeps founding companies to put them to work. His war is with overclaiming, in both directions: he has been equally dismissive of imminent-AGI prophets and existential-risk doomers.