Rodney Brooks writes about the seven cognitive errors that lead to wildly mistaken predictions about the future of robotics and artificial intelligence. He frames four categories of predictions—Artificial General Intelligence, the Singularity, misaligned values, and evil AI entities—then dissects the reasoning failures behind them: overestimating short-term impact while underestimating long-term effects, treating far-future technology as unfalsifiable magic, confusing narrow task performance with broad competence, relying on ambiguous "suitcase words" like "learn" or "understand," extrapolating exponentials that will inevitably flatten, imagining Hollywood-style single-disruption scenarios, and ignoring the glacial pace of hardware deployment in the physical world.
- The OpenWorm project spent thirty years attempting to simulate C. elegans (302 neurons, 7,000 connections) bottom-up and was not yet halfway done as of 2017.
- iPod storage followed a perfect five-year exponential (10→160 GB) then collapsed abruptly once a single device could hold a complete music library.
- Modern factory automation still relies on PLCs introduced in 1968 that emulate electromechanical relays; Tesla was actively hiring PLC technicians at its Fremont factory.
- Autonomous vehicles drove on public roads in 1987 and coast-to-coast across the US in 1995, yet no large-scale deployment path had been identified by 2017.
- Brooks observes that humans coexisted with horses—autonomous agents with ongoing existences and super-human strength—for millennia without a single formal theorem about them.
- The OpenWorm project spent thirty years attempting to simulate C. elegans (302 neurons, 7,000 connections) bottom-up and was not yet halfway done as of 2017.
- iPod storage followed a perfect five-year exponential (10→160 GB) then collapsed abruptly once a single device could hold a complete music library.
- Modern factory automation still relies on PLCs introduced in 1968 that emulate electromechanical relays; Tesla was actively hiring PLC technicians at its Fremont factory.
- Autonomous vehicles drove on public roads in 1987 and coast-to-coast across the US in 1995, yet no large-scale deployment path had been identified by 2017.
- Brooks observes that humans coexisted with horses—autonomous agents with ongoing existences and super-human strength—for millennia without a single formal theorem about them.
