Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

For example, saying that flying cars will be in widespread use NET 2025 is not much of a prediction. I think we can all say that if flying cars will be in widespread use, it will happen No Earlier Than 2025. It could happen in 2060, and that NET 2025 prediction would still be true. He could mark it green in 2026 and say he was right, that, yes, there are no flying cars, and so mark his scorecard another point in the correct column. But is that really a prediction?

A bolder prediction would be, say "Within 1-2 yrs of XX".

So what is Rodney Brooks really trying to predict and say? I'd rather read about what the necessary gating conditions are for something significant and prediction-worthy to occur, or what the intractable problems are that would make something not be possible within a predicted time, rather than reading about him complain about how much overhype and media sensation there is in the AI and robotics (and space) fields. Yes, there is, but that's not much of a prediction or statement either, as it's fairly obvious.

There's also a bit of an undercurrent of complaint in this long article about how the not-as-sexy or hyped work he has done for all those years has gone relatively unrewarded and "undeserving types" are getting all the attention (and money). And as such, many of the predictions and commentary on them read more as rant than as prediction.

Then I bet Rodney can just fiddle with goal post and say that 3.26 trillion miles were driven in US in 2024, and having a human intervene 1000 miles would mean 3.26 billion interventions, and that this is clearly not self driving. In fact until Waymo disables Internet on all cars and prices it never needs any intervention ever, Rodney can claim he’s right, even then maybe not stopping exactly where Rodney wanted it to, might be proof that self driving doesn’t work.

Next big thing after deep learning prediction is clearly false. LLM is deep learning, scaled up, we are not in any sense looking past deep learning. Rodney I bet wanted it to be symbolic AI, but that is most likely a dead end, and the bitter lesson actually holds. In fact we have been riding this deep learning wave since Alex-Net 2012. OpenAI talked about scaling since 2016 and during that time the naysayers could be very confident and claim we needed something more, but OpenAI went ahead and proved out the scaling hypothesis and passed the language Turing test. We haven’t needed anything more except scale and reasoning has also turned out to be similar. Just an LLM trained to reason, no symbolic merger, not even a search step it seems like.

Tell that to someone laid off when replaced by some "AI" system.

> Waymo not autonomous enough

It's not clear how often Waymo cars need remote attention, but it's not every 1-2 miles. Customers would notice the vehicle being stopped and stuck during the wait for customer service. There are many videos of people driving in Waymos for hours without any sign of a situation that required remote intervention.

Tesla and Baidu do use remote drivers.

The situations where Waymo cars get stuck are now somewhat obscure cases. Yesterday, the new mayor of SF had two limos double-parked, and a Waymo got stuck behind that. A Waymo got stuck in a parade that hadn't been listed on Muni's street closure list.

> Flying cars

Probably at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. They won't be cost-effective, but it will be a cool demo. EHang recently put solid state batteries into their flying car and got 48 minutes of flight time, instead of their previous 25 minutes. Ehang is basically a scaled-up quadrotor drone, with 16 motors and props. EHang been flying for years, but not for very long per recharge. Better batteries will help a lot.

[1] https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/electric-air-taxi-flights-...