January 7, 2026
Crystal ball vs. comment brawl
2026 Predictions Scorecard
He says “mostly right” — commenters yell “moving the goalposts”
TLDR: Robotics veteran Rodney Brooks says his 2018 predictions still mostly hold and claims he nailed the 2023 AI moment. Commenters clap back over self-driving definitions, Tesla snubs, and flying car timelines, turning a tidy scorecard into a brawl over accountability, hype, and what counts as “real” progress
Rodney Brooks, a robotics legend, dropped his 2026 “Predictions Scorecard,” saying his 2018 calls held “pretty well” and he foresaw a big AI moment by 2023 (hello, large language models). The community instantly split: some praise the veteran realist; others cry vague victory laps. Moderator dang posted receipts from past threads.
Biggest flame war: self-driving. Brooks says only Waymo and Zoox matter, and they don’t count as truly self-driving if humans still intervene. One commenter cheered the snub of “the speculation company of the century” — “We don’t have to mention it either” — and Tesla stans stormed in. Critics accuse Brooks of rules lawyering to keep his calls right; defenders counter that intervention rate (how often a human must take over) decides whether this tech makes money.
Side drama: flying cars. A poster claims “Flying cars are nearly ready,” citing Alef Aero manufacturing, and declares Brooks’ 2036 date toast. Skeptics eye-roll: “Kickstarter with wings.” Meanwhile, “Shor’s still only 35” in quantum computing becomes the meme of the day for “still not there.”
The mood: accountability vs. ambiguity. Brooks brings receipts; commenters bring the popcorn. The scorecard became a scoreboard
Key Points
- •This is the eighth annual update on predictions made January 1, 2018 about self-driving cars, AI/ML/robotics, and human space travel.
- •Brooks judges his predictions largely accurate but slightly too optimistic overall.
- •He predicted a major AI advance would be broadly accepted no earlier than 2023; LLMs fit that timeline, enabled by the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need.”
- •He emphasizes differing speeds among research, hype, deployment, and economic change, informed by his decades in AI.
- •He plans a 2026 archival post consolidating past date-specific comments and will continue tracking these domains, plus five new predictions made in early 2025.