Here is one of our fleets of Carter robots, from my company Robust.AI, charging overnight at a DHL warehouse. We are scaling up. Most of our fleets run two full shifts then all dock and recharge, though in some facilities individual robots do partial recharges when they see an opportunity.

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...

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:

"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.

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...

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.

Lora Kolodny@lorak.bsky.social · 2w ago

Um. The humanoid robot, Optimus, is not bound for customers' or partners' sites any time soon. Tesla said it expects "to start production soon," and "initial Optimus builds will be used in our Optimus Academy for training data collection and further functionality development." (unsurprising womp?)

"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...

The Real Cost Of Cooling GPUs In Space Might Shock You

Shedding heat will require ingenious new designs

spectrum.ieee.org

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.

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.

John Berry@aniccia.bsky.social · 3w ago

Waymo crash: A13 approaching New Barn St, London, England One Waymo is visibly damaged, but the second Waymo may not be. Possible it was involved in the crash or transported Waymo vehicle recovery ppl to the scene. Approx Streetview location: maps.app.goo.gl/1HjDzTzPScKj... OP: tiktok._rom.romz

"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...

Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project

theatlantic.com

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...

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...

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...

theinformation.com

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.

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.

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...

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.

edition.cnn.com

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...

How Ants Inspired This Founder To Build A Robotic Vacuum Cleaner

YouTube video by Forbes

youtube.com

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...

Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Build a Robot Without China

nytimes.com

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.

Rob Tow@robtow.bsky.social · 2mo ago

It's a bait and switch. SpaceX shows you the cloud cut loose from Earth; you bet on that card and it was never on the table. Orbit doesn't kill the heat, the spectrum, or the power bill. It just moves them where you can't see them. New, on Substack: robtow.substack.com/p/the-cloud-...

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.

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...

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)]

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...

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.

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...

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.

techcrunch.com

To let you know where we are now: as of Apr '26, 637 people have reached Earth orbit (some multiple times--Ross and Chang-Diaz 7 times each). 28 people (three: Lovell, Young, and Cernan, twice each) have traveled beyond low Earth orbit and either circled, orbited, or walked on the Moon.

In January Blue Origin shut down their sub-orbital tourist program 2 months after announcing major expansions to it. The Moon is will be where reality is concentrated for the next few years. We humans have not yet figured out how we need to package ourselves to survive a trip to Mars. Unsolved.

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com · 2mo ago

Blue Origin has secured a multimillion-dollar contract to deliver lunar rovers and other equipment to the moon, part of NASA’s efforts to construct a base at the lunar South Pole for “sustained human presence” by the 2030s, the agency said.

Autonomous Waymos are new to freeways; they must drive continuously or they block traffic so no time for remote human assistance. Stopped Waymos in the middle of freeways and dumb behaviors recently, so Waymo is shutting down all freeway ops in the US for now. www.sfgate.com/news/article...

Waymo suspends all freeway rides over safety

Waymo said it's pausing its robotaxi services on freeways in the U.S. as it updates its software to improve performance around construction zones and flooded roads.

sfgate.com

I'm with Jason on this one....

Jason K Pargin, author@jasonkpargin.bsky.social · last yr.

I'm so old that I'm still kind of scared to put spaces in file names

Former humanoid lead at Tesla: "to reach human parity ... with industrial-grade reliability could be 5, 10 or 30 years. Nobody knows. Demos and kickboxing humanoids are not the same as scaled performance in an industrial setting." www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Humanoids Won&#39;t Replace Warehouse Automation, Yet | Chris Walti posted on the topic | LinkedIn

I led the humanoid robot program at Tesla. People ask me if humanoids will replace warehouse automation. Here’s my answer: Humanoids are the icing on the cake. Most warehouses still need the cake. R...

linkedin.com