Public postmortem
Rethink Robotics
“It taught robots to work beside us. It never taught the economics to keep pace.”
Here liesRethink Robotics2008 · 2018“It taught robots to work beside us. It never taught the economics to keep pace.”
84 roses left
What happened
The honest ending.
- Cause of death
- Baxter and Sawyer made factory robots safer and friendlier, but sacrificed the speed and precision manufacturers buy for. Services-heavy deployments erased the promised affordability.
- Lesson left behind
- Customers buy throughput, not a charming demo. Rodney Brooks carried the human-centered thesis into Robust AI, pairing approachability with production-grade performance.
Keep clicking
The build ended. The builder did not.
Your turn
Give a dead project one last launch.
Keep the honest lesson, preserve the link, and introduce the internet to whatever you are building next.
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