An MIT roboticist who cofounded bankrupt robot vacuum maker iRobot says Elon Musk’s vision of humanoid robot assistants is ‘pure fantasy thinking’

While investors are busy pouring billions of dollars into humanoid robots, an MIT roboticist who has been making robots for three decades claims they are wasting their money.

Rodney Brooks, cofounder of Roomba vacuum creator iRobot, said the idea of humanoid robots as catchall assistants, the future Elon Musk envisions, is “pure fantasy thinking,” in part because robots are coordination-challenged. 

“Today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training,” said Brooks in a blog post.

The sensation of touch is one of the most complex systems in the human body. The human hand contains 17,000 low-threshold mechanoreceptors for picking up light touches, which become denser toward the end of the fingertips. The receptors in your hands respond to myriad stimuli-like pressures—vibrations in sync with 15 different families of neurons. All of this adds up to a complex mechanism that humans want to replicate in robots. 

While AI has been trained on large amounts of speech-reco...