Discussion

• @rodneyabrooks Rodney Brooks on x

  I have just finished and just published some weekend reading for you. 9,600 words of not easy reading, on why today's humanoid robots won't learn to be dexterous. https://rodneybrooks.com/...

• @yuxiang_irvl Yu Xiang on x

  The big message I get: most learning-based manipulation methods mainly focus on kinematics, where the sense of touch is not learned from data (critical for dexterity)

• @techcrunch.com @techcrunch.com on bluesky

  Brooks, who co-founded iRobot and spent decades at MIT, is particularly skeptical of companies like Tesla and Figure trying to teach robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans doing tasks.  In a new essay, he calls this approach “pure fantasy thinking.”

• @glynmoody Glyn Moody on bluesky

  Famed roboticist says humanoid #robot bubble is doomed to burst - techcrunch.com/2025/09/26/f... “Human hands are incredibly sophisticated, packed with about 17,000 specialized touch receptors that no robot comes close to matching.”

• @glinden Greg Linden on bluesky

  Good article by an expert in the field.  To summarize, we won't have humanoid robots in the next 15 years, but we will have a lot of defining down what “humanoid robot” means, those still won't work for much, and VCs will lose investors a lot of money.  [embedded post]

• @mm-jj-nn Mark J. Nelson on bluesky

  Interesting long-form argument from Rodney Brooks that methods similar to the ones from the deep learning era of AI that cracked image recognition, text generation, etc. are unlikely to crack humanoid robot dexterity in the near future.

• r/technology r on reddit

  Famed roboticist says humanoid robot bubble is doomed to burst