2026 Predictions Scorecard

Summary

Nothing is ever as good as it first seems and nothing is ever as bad as it first seems. — A best memory paraphrase of advice given to me by Vice Admiral Joe Dyer, former chief test pilot of the US Navy and former Commander of NAVAIR. [You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks] Table of contents Introduction What I Nearly Got Wrong What Has Surprised Me, And That I Missed 8 Years Ago My Color Scheme and Past Analysis My New Predictions Quantum Computers Self Driving Cars Humanoid Robots Neural Computation LLMs Self Driving Cars A Brief Recap of what "Self Driving" Cars Means and Meant My Own Experiences with Waymo in 2025 Self Driving Taxi Services __Cruise __Tesla __Waymo __Zoox Electric Cars Flying Cars Robotics, AI, and Machine Learning Capabilities and Competences World Models Situatedness vs Embodiment Dexterous Hands Human Space Flight Orbital Crewed Flights Suborbital Crewed Flights Boeing's Starliner SpaceX Falcon 9 NASA, Artemis, and Returning to the Moon SpaceX Starship Blue Origin Gets to Orbit New Space Stations Addendum Introduction This is my eighth annual update on how my dated predictions from January 1st, 2018 concerning (1) self driving cars, (2) robotics, AI , and machine learning, and (3) human space travel, have held up. I promised then to review them at the start of the year every year until 2050 (right after my 95th birthday), thirty two years in total. The idea was to hold myself accountable for those predictions. How right or wrong was I? The summary is that my predictions held up pretty well, though overall I was a little too optimistic. That is a little ironic, as I think that many people who read my predictions back on January 1st, 2018 thought that I was very pessimistic compared to the then zeitgeist. I prefer to think of myself as being a realist. And did I see LLMs coming? No and yes. Yes, I did say that something new and big that everyone accepted...