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Rodney Brooks

@rodneyabrooks.bsky.social
9K followers 32 following 538 posts

Primarily Robotics and AI. Distinguishing hype-notism from plausibility one press release at a time. rodneybrooks.com/blog people.csail.mit.edu/brooks

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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
My grandsons are either amused or perplexed (I can't quite tell). San Fransisco is full of(really full as of this week) robot autos, and now this. I get to hang out with graffiti!
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Immigrants make the US work. Today Lisa Su (CEO of AMD) and Fei-Fei Li founder of World Labs (and a professor at Stanford) joined forces. (Fei-Fei's first job in the US was in a dry cleaning shop.) Fantastic. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...
linkedin.com
To Seek a Newer World | Fei-Fei Li | 338 comments
World Labs is joining AMD. This is a huge moment for World Labs, our team, and for me. I wanted to take a moment to share what this means and why I’m so excited for this next chapter – read more in my...
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
My Jan 1 blog post: "humanoid robots will get wheels for feet ... with nothing that any longer really resembles human legs in gross form. But they will still be called humanoid robots." The essay below reports it is now happening at Apptronik, Toyota, and Agility. www.linkedin.com/pulse/end-le...
linkedin.com
The End of Legs? Why Humanoid Robots May Have to Roll Into the Future
The humanoid robotics boom began with legs. For decades, one of the most difficult challenges in robotics was getting a machine to walk like a human.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
SpaceX aiming at 14th Starship flight in 3.5 years, and 1st time getting to orbit; previous record was 11 non orbital flights for 60s Europa (my dad was on the team & I remember them all). This is make or break for getting humans to the Moon under NASAs current plans. www.space.com/space-explor...
space.com
SpaceX pushes next Starship launch back to Sept. 28, a 6-day delay for megarocket's 1st orbital flight
The company gave no explanation for the delay.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
We're hiring at Robust AI as we scale up deployments across the US. Real robots working with real people and providing ROI to our customers 24/7. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...
linkedin.com
Join the team building robots that work with people, not just around them. Our flagship robot, Carter, combines physical AI, cutting-edge robotics, and human-centered design to support picking… | Ro...
Join the team building robots that work with people, not just around them. Our flagship robot, Carter, combines physical AI, cutting-edge robotics, and human-centered design to support picking, puta...
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
@doctorow.pluralistic.net flips it around, that too many of us humans are hallucinating about Claude having intent. He pushes us to be AI atheists. It is a provocative, but welcome, stance. pluralistic.net/2026/09/21/s...
pluralistic.net
Pluralistic: The Claude Delusion (21 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Humanoid robotics spent the last few years accommodating Newton's law of universal gravitation. Work on humanoid dexterity has ignored Newton's third law of motion. But it is still the law. Trajectories that one observes for human dexterity are the result of external forces, not the causal motions.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
This is coming up first thing in the morning on October 20th.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Email today offering to pay me to endorse: "The campaign is for one of the largest Chinese humanoid robotics companies, focused on credible thought leaders across X & LinkedIn for Western-market awareness. We think you’d be a strong fit. If you’re interested, could you send over your current rates"
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Another good one today. The link gives the overview of a 66 page paper dissecting 24 predictions about AI since 1950 through now, and why most of them are not testable statements--"not even wrong". But they certainly to get the press worked up. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...
linkedin.com
See Luciano Floridi’s activity on LinkedIn
Sign in or join now to see posts like this one and more.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Cory @doctorow.pluralistic.net has been writing about inflammatory AI predictions for years. Message below is that systems are being deployed & given the ability to do real things on the network, without adequate testing or guardrails. The systems have zero intentions. medium.com/@doctorow/ll...
medium.com
LLMs are real, AI is fake
No, it didn’t “go rogue.”
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I have long thought that SpaceX's Starship is suffering from "second system syndrome", where the first system you built was wildly successful, but you have too many "must have"s, that threaten your second system's success. Turns out that term comes from 1975's Mythical Man Month about IBM's OS/360.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Everyone wants to be a prophet of doom. From Bruce Mehlman's substack today brucemehlman.substack.com
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Look at *any* humanoid movie showing dexterity and compare to my haul of plastic on the beach tonight. 15 pieces in the left hand, stuffed there by my right hand, then 7 more one handed pickups on the right. Humans routinely use this level of dexterity in manual tasks. Humanoid robots not so much.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
@melaniemitchell.bsky.social always writes careful reviews of all sorts of claims about computation and AI, cleanly cutting through the hype to get at what the fundamental underlying truths are. Today: Open AI/Hugging Face. The last paragraph is the message! aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading...
aiguide.substack.com
Misleading Metaphors, Real Risks
What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
What, an Anthropic researcher states (without evidence) that there is a 10% chance that AI will cause human extinction? Incredible, we have never before heard such a claim!
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
On September 22nd, I'll be doing a live podcast with Brian Heater in Mountain View followed by drinks and discussion (thank you Silicon Valley Robotics!). Register here. luma.com/n688dcl5
luma.com
Automated Happy Hour · Luma
Join the Brian Heater, the Automated Podcast Crew and Silicon Valley Robotics for a great evening of networking, talks and robotics demos in Mountain View,…
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Thank you @mikeyass.bsky.social for pointing this out. Yes, all my robotics, AI, startup, human spaceflight, autonomous vehicles etc., posting is uniquely here on Blue Sky.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
1/4 Humanoid markets are getting less frothy. First two paragraphs from a story below that is behind a paywall. www.theinformation.com/articles/chi...
theinformation.com
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Hey @ericlipton.nytimes.com 👋 AI is not “evolving” on its own. *People* are choosing how to build it. *People* are choosing how to train it. *People* are choosing how to run it. Maybe the problem is that they are the *wrong people* to make these choices.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Jitendra and I have been friends for 46 years, and I was a member of his thesis committee. I don't agree with him on everything, but here I do. x.com/JitendraMali...
x.com
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I just loaded my final report from a 1999-2004 research program, along with 73 research papers, at the bottom of the link below. We were teaching humanoids tasks using imitation and social interactions. Many historical documents from others higher on the page. people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/docum...
people.csail.mit.edu
Rodney Brooks Bio
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Who cares how fast a robot can run?? What we need is robots that can be in close collaboration with people, including helping the elderly in and out of bed and the bathroom, and being safe for people when in the same workspace.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Jonny Kim was in the lunar landing cohort and looked like a strong candidate for first return to the Moon. Further departures from NASA from within that team will be an indicator of internal loss of faith in the now very unlikely return to surface schedule. www.nasa.gov/news-release...
nasa.gov
NASA Astronaut Jonny Kim Departs Agency to Continue Military Service - NASA
After nearly a decade of service to NASA, including an eight-month science expedition aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Jonny Kim’s last day
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Things are going great at Robust.AI which I cofounded in 2019 and which is my everyday job. Getting robots to real deployment takes a long time (Covid didn't help...). www.automate.org/robotics/ind...
automate.org
Robust.AI Makes Leadership Changes at it Deploys 100th Robot
The industry vet discusses market realities amid unprecedented hype.
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John Berry @aniccia.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
A Sr Waymo telop (ERT: Event Response Team, can remotely drive vehicles per Waymo) told a passenger "I don't have clear visuals on what's going on" It took ~minute to get "visuals" (~9 cameras), which prob need >10 mbps ~continuously. US cell service is rarely life safety grade. OP: x.TexasTSLA
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Just published a shot blog post on four different time scales that technology development and deployment works at simultaneously. It is short. rodneybrooks.com/four-time-sc...
rodneybrooks.com
Four Time Scales for Technology Development and Deployment – Rodney Brooks
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
1/3 How do you feel about living in a world full of rude robots that have been trained to navigate from watching first person shooter games and to treat you as an NPC (non player character)? [Admittedly, in such a game it is better to be an NPC...] I asked Gemini about this new set of startups:
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
"Ironically, scientists have abandoned the idea that living organisms have been designed by God, only to adopt of model of the living based on artifacts made by an engineer." Ch 1 of "The Brain, in Theory" Romain Brette Princeton U. Press 2026. Ch 1 is a tour de force take down of computationalism.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Update on my dated tech predictions from Jan 1, 2018. Most dates were for the first ten years (spoiler alert: I was overly optimistic when everyone thought I was being a pessimist). New analysis every Jan 1st for 24 more years, on the remainder plus 5 new themes. rodneybrooks.com/house-cleani...
rodneybrooks.com
House Cleaning My January 1, 2018 Predictions – Rodney Brooks
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Report from Tesla's earnings call today. The magical-thinking promises about Optimus have caused so many others to pile on to the humanoid in the sky dream.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
"Cooling is where physics separates the science from the fiction. The governing equation for radiative cooling, the only type of cooling available in space, is known as the Stefan-Boltzmann Law." A midrange 100 MW data center would need 200,000 sq meters of cooling. spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data...
spectrum.ieee.org
The Real Cost Of Cooling GPUs In Space Might Shock You
Shedding heat will require ingenious new designs
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Waymo is not a taxi service. It is an experiment. After driving me to my door at home many times, tonight it insisted on dropping me on another street. Customer service told me the road was blocked and that it was an easy walk home. There was no blockage, and it is one of the steepest hills in SF.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Waymo crash in London. Rational risk/reward computations do not apply here. Things can go south for a self driving company very quickly. See Cruise. Used to be bigger than Waymo in SF, until one incident, an incident they did not cause, but an incident that they did not do well in mitigating.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
"AI...making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models...are so resource-hungry that tech companies...purchasing 70% of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage." The opposite of what we expect from new technologies. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
theatlantic.com
Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was in 1956. This summer is the 70th anniversary. I've been full time in AI for 50 of those 70 years. We're a long way from those early days but we have vastly further to go, despite what the hype says. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmou...
en.wikipedia.org
Dartmouth workshop - Wikipedia
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
In SF I always see a driverless Waymo within 2 or 3 blocks. Have seen one(!) Robotaxi; required to have a human driver. "As of mid-May, the company currently has 1,901 drivers and 414 vehicles registered for the service in the state" 4.5 drivers per Robotaxi... www.theinformation.com/articles/tes...
theinformation.com
Tesla’s Robotaxi Push Tests New Blueprint for Scaling Fast
Before Tesla launched its Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, last summer, it recruited hundreds of workers to test and monitor the system. When it expanded the service to Miami this past weekend, it r...
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
1/8 Two years ago I wrote a chapter for an MIT Press book "Designing an Intelligence", edited by George Konidaris, which looks like it will be published later this year. My chapter, "Intelligence without Intelligence", poses 12 provocative questions about implicit assumptions.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
1/9 On Fri Jun 26th I was on an AI panel at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation event "Humanity at the Core" in Athens, with Francesca Rossi, John Cleese, Garry Kasparov, moderated by magician Mark Mitton.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
This story starts out realistically "they're basically oversized toys", but then slides into hypenotism with talking points from humanoid companies and investment bankers. edition.cnn.com/2026/06/30/t...
edition.cnn.com
Chinese androids captivate the world. A rental market is exposing their limits | CNN Business
When Ai Lin bought his first humanoid robot last year, he wasn’t thinking about how it could make his life easier by doing his dishes. He instead rented it out.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
A few weeks ago, as part of Forbes magazine's celebration of America's 250 greatest living innovators, @kerrydolan.bsky.social interviewed me inside the iconic garage where Hewlett and Packard started HP--a hallowed part of silicon valley history. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpXX...
youtube.com
How Ants Inspired This Founder To Build A Robotic Vacuum Cleaner
YouTube video by Forbes
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
1/8 Finally the press is seeing beyond the razzle dazzle of dancing humanoids. Following are all quotes from a NYTimes story from June 11th. "making humanoid robots has proved easier to achieve than finding a purpose for them" www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/b...
nytimes.com
Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Build a Robot Without China
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
I have known Rob Tow for 30+ years. He is really producing great reality reports on technologies that are getting ultra hyped. Here is his well researched, well referenced, and impeccable technical destruction of data centers in orbit--the key driver in the hype around SpaceX's valuation.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
On ML & and hammers and nails. Steam engine invented 1698, water pumps for mines 1712, factories 1780, trains 1825, ships 1840, global transportation 1875, massive ships 1900+, cars 1906. Airplanes? Single demo flight 1933. Space launch? Nada. The moral: not all tools work well for everything.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
It is worth clicking on this eXtwitter post my Jitendra Malik (who I have known for 46 years). He is the best Computer Vision researcher in the world. No contest. x.com/JitendraMali...
x.com
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Small joys in an unhappy world. 6 bytes of code with no branching to compute 32 bit max(0, r1-r2), i.e, saturating subtraction, using three Thumb instructions on an ARM 32: sub r1, r2 asr r2, r1, 31 bic r1, r2 [here (bit clear) bic is r1 <-- r1 & (complement of r2)]
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
In March 2019 (pre LLMs) I wrote a review, titled "A Better Lesson", of Rich Sutton's "A Bitter Lesson". Its arguments about misplaced human work, and cost of computation apply just as well to LLMs and hyped and hypothesized foundation models as magic bullets. rodneybrooks.com/a-better-les...
rodneybrooks.com
A Better Lesson – Rodney Brooks
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Techno-fantasists like to think that us humans will be spurred to transcend our nature by the arrival of some just around the corner fabulous technology. The 21st century so far teaches us that our nature is pretty much fixed. Cheating, lying, cruelty, greed, arrogance, & ignorance are in abundance.
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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Blue Origin's New Glenn, just exploded on the launch pad during a static test fire. Not a good day for New Glenn or for US plans for return to the Moon. techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/b...
techcrunch.com
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket explodes during testing in Florida | TechCrunch
The explosion is likely a major setback for Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company, and its attempt to compete with SpaceX.
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