MIT professor emeritus Rodney Brooks has been posting an annual Predictions Scorecard in rodneybrooks.com since January 1, 2018, where he predicts future milestones in three technology areas: AI and robotics, self driving cars, and human space travel. He also reviews the actual progress in each of these areas to see how his past predictions have held up. On January 1 he posted his 2025 Predictions Scorecard.
Two weeks ago I discussed Brooks’ predictions on “The Future of AI and Robotics.” I now want to discuss his predictions on The Future of Self-driving Cars and Robotaxis.
Fully autonomous vehicle (AVs) may well be the quintessential symbol of our AI/robotics age. Cars are a major part of our daily lives. Unlike other AI and robotics applications, a self-driven vehicle is a concept that requires little explanation, — something we can all quickly grasp. It wasn’t that long ago that the notion of an AV driving us around while we read or sleep would have felt like the stuff of science fiction. This is no longer the case.
Brooks wrote that “the definition, or common understanding, of what self driving cars really means has changed since my post on predictions seven years ago. At that time self driving cars meant that the cars would drive themselves to wherever they were told to go with no further human control inputs. Now self driving cars means that there is no one in the drivers seat, but there may well be, as is the case in all cases so far deployed, humans monitoring those cars from a remote location, and occasionally sending control inputs to the cars.”
He references a recent NY Times article, “When Self-Driving Cars Don’t Actually Drive Themselves” by technology reporter Cade Metz. Metz wrote that when he took his first ride in a self-driving car nearly a decade ago, “I felt a deep sense of awe that machines had mastered a skill that once belonged solely to humans.” He added that over the past ten years “it become increasingly clear to me that although self-driving cars were shockingly nimble — indeed awe-inspiring — they could not yet match the power of the human brain. They still can’t.”
Metz was co-author of another recent NYT article, which noted that self-driving cars get help from humans hundreds of miles away in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Las Vegas where robotaxis navigate city streets without a driver. “For years, companies avoided mentioning the remote assistance provided to their self-driving cars. The illusion of complete autonomy helped to draw attention to their technology and encourage venture capitalists to invest the billions of dollars needed to build increasingly effective autonomous vehicles.”
“One of the motivations for self driving cars was that the economics of taxis, — cars that people hire at any time for a short ride of a few miles from where they are to somewhere else of their choosing, — would be radically different as there would be no driver,” noted Brooks. “Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations to make a business case for their adoption and therefore their time horizon to scaling across geographies.”
“Actual self-driving is now generally accepted to be much harder than every one believed,” Brooks added.
“In the past whenever we have introduced new transportation mechanisms there have been large investments in infrastructure and that infrastructure is shared and used by everyone. The Romans built roads so soldiers and traded goods could travel long distances -– in Europe those road networks are still the basis of today’s road networks. “When steam engine driven trains were the new transportation technology vast networks of rails were built allowing goods to move long distances in mere hours or days.” And when the assembly line enabled the mass production of cars in the early decades of the 20th century, governments around the world launched major road building programs, many of which are still in use.
But with fully self-driving cars, there was an implicit promise that given technology advances, each individual vehicle would now be able to control itself, with a variety of sensors and AI algorithms. There was be no longer a need to develop expensive new shared infrastructures to assist and guide the cars, as had been the case with transportation systems throughout history.
“The promise was false,” said Brooks. Government and enterprises should have partnered in the development of smart roads that would not only support autonomous vehicles but would enhance traffic management, improve road safety, and make transportation more efficient and environmentally friendly.
“The road would have had lots of sensors effectively shared across all cars, as that data would have been transmitted to all passing cars. It would have been a fraction of the cost per car compared to the sensing on today’s almost but not really self driving cars like those of Waymo. And we would have had much more accurate congestion data where the root causes of local congestion would have been sensed with semantic understanding rather than just inferring it from the aggregate collection of location data from phones, individual cars, and historical data from roadside sensors.”
“Instead we now have individual corporate actors using a mixture of partial self driving and remote human supervision. The big question is whether the economics of this works at scale, and whether the fake promises will drive out human drivers with cheaper services.” But, in the end, we’ll all end up paying more, he added. “Will the level of hype we saw push our decentralized transportation system into the hands of a few wealthy companies, and in effect make it a centralized system where everybody has to pay private companies to be part of it?”
In his 2025 Predictions Scorecard, Brooks listed a number of predictions made by executives of major car companies involved in the development of autonomous vehicles since 2017. They all argued that self -driving cars would be generally available within a few years, but as of 2024 none of them have come to pass.
He also discussed the state of self driving taxi services in the US, all of which include remote operators monitoring their robotaxis and intervening as needed. There have been three such companies, Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox.
Waymo is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Google has been developing self driving technologies for approximately 15 years. In 2015, Google demonstrated the world’s first self driving car on a public road and a year later Google founded Waymo as part of Alphabet. Waymo operates commercial robotaxi services in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, with new services planned in Austin and Miami.
Cruise was founded in 2013 to develop autonomous car technologies. The startup was acquired by General Motors in 2016, and operated as an autonomous GM subsidiary. Cruise suspended operations in 2023 after a series of incidents. In December of 2024 Cruise was integrated into the GM units that develop driver assistance technologies for personal vehicles. GM announced that it's refocusing its AV efforts on advanced driving assistance systems for its personal vehicles.
Zoox, was founded in 2014 to develop entirely new autonomous vehicles for the robotaxi markets based on the assumption that this is a better approach than retrofitting self-driving technologies into existing cars as has been the case with Waymo and Cruise. In 2020 Zoox became a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon. In 2025, Zoox plans to start testing its new vehicles as well as offering self-driving taxi services in Las Vegas and San Francisco.
Zoox isn’t comparable to Waymo or Cruise because it’s so much smaller, said Brooks. He noted that “the demise of Cruise leaves just one company, Waymo, trying to make an actual go of a digital taxi service in the United States. They have an enormous significant lead over anyone else who wants get into this business and have spent billions of dollars (probably very much north of $10 billion) on this endeavor over the last 15 years. In an email they sent me a couple of weeks ago as a user of their services they reported that they provided 4 million customer rides in 2024. That is approximately 4 million more than any other company in the United States.”
“Here is the question for the future of watered down remote monitored ‘autonomous’ driving systems (let’s call it ‘watered down autonomy’), and it is up to Waymo now,” wrote Brook in conclusion. “Can Waymo expand fast enough in these new markets in 2025 and take enough business from what is left of traditional taxi operators, along with those operating under the Uber and Lyft models, and do it in a way which is in sight of profitability, so that it has a case to raise the stupendous amounts of money needed to operate in all large cities in the US in the next 10 t0 20 years?”
“If Waymo can not succeed at this in the next two years I think the idea of large scale use of watered down autonomy will be dead for at least a decade or two. Right now full autonomy everywhere is already dead.”
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