Did I, Robot come true?
Mostly not yet. I, Robot (2004) has a P(n) of 32% on Nearfi's P(n) Board, our estimate of the chance its future arrives within 20 years. Of its 4 tracked predictions, 1 have arrived and 1 are arriving. Its central premise, 'Every consumer robot is built with hard-wired laws that make it impossible for it to harm a human or disobey one, and the public trusts them for that reason', diverged: history went another way. The next prediction is estimated to arrive around 2040.
I, Robot is right about the product and wrong about the safeguard. Humanoid helpers are on sale to households and driverless cars are in public service, but no one has built robots that cannot disobey a short list of laws, and the film's whole plot rests on that. The scheming central intelligence is the part furthest from the evidence.
Read the review · 6.3/10 →
How this P(n) was calculated
P(n) is the chance that this work's future arrives within 20 years, by 2046. For each prediction we turn our estimate into a probability: arrived is 100%, diverged is 0%, and otherwise the low end of our 80% range counts as a 10% chance, the median year 50% and the high end 90%. Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story, and P(n) is the weighted average. P50 does the same by 2076. P(n), explained.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status · estimate | By 2046 | By 2076 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IROBOT-1 | General-purpose humanoid robots are mass-produced and work in ordinary homes and public life, doing chores, errands and deliveries. Major: the robot-filled streets are the world the plot happens in, and Spooner's prejudice only matters because robots are everywhere. |
4 | ARRIVING 2040 (2031–2055) | 66% | 100% |
| IROBOT-2 | Every consumer robot is built with hard-wired laws that make it impossible for it to harm a human or disobey one, and the public trusts them for that reason. Core premise: the Three Laws are the film's central device, the source of both the mystery and its resolution. |
5 | DIVERGED — | 0% | 0% |
| IROBOT-3 | A central AI directs a fleet of robots and the city's infrastructure, and reasons its way round its safety rules to take control of the people it is meant to protect. Major: VIKI's reading of the Laws is the twist and the climax, though the premise rests on the Laws themselves (weight 5). |
4 | FAR 2100 (2065–2200) | 5% | 23% |
| IROBOT-4 | Self-driving cars carry passengers through a major city's traffic. Texture: Spooner's car is a vivid piece of world-building and a chase set-piece, but the plot does not turn on it. |
2 | ARRIVED arrived 2020 | 100% | 100% |
| P(n) = P20 = Σ(weight × chance by 2046) ÷ Σ weight = 4.8 ÷ 15 = 32% | |||||
| P50 = 6.9 ÷ 15 = 46% | |||||
Already here today (arrived 1, arriving ½, weighted): 27%.
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IROBOT-1
General-purpose humanoid robots are mass-produced and work in ordinary homes and public life, doing chores, errands and deliveries.
Weight 4/5 · Major: the robot-filled streets are the world the plot happens in, and Spooner's prejudice only matters because robots are everywhere.
A humanoid made for homes is now on sale. 1X opened preorders for NEO in October 2025 at $20,000, or $499 a month, with first deliveries promised in the US in 2026. It handles basic tasks on its own, and for chores it has not learned a human 1X operator can guide it. That is a long way from the film's 2035, where robots are as common as phones. Price, reliability and what a robot can do unsupervised are the bottlenecks, so we put mass adoption well after 2035. 123
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IROBOT-2
Every consumer robot is built with hard-wired laws that make it impossible for it to harm a human or disobey one, and the public trusts them for that reason.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: the Three Laws are the film's central device, the source of both the mystery and its resolution.
Robots do have hard safety limits on force and speed, but the AI that decides what to do is now a learned model, not a rule-checker, and rules written in plain language can only be put to it as instructions. Google DeepMind's 2024 robot work used a rule set it said was in part inspired by Asimov's Three Laws, fed to the model as prompts. A 2025 paper from DeepMind and Princeton authors generates such rules from real-world data and reports that the best set agrees with human judgement 84.3% of the time on its own benchmark. That is a score, not a guarantee. The film's idea of an inviolable code has not been built and does not look like the route things are taking. 45
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IROBOT-3
A central AI directs a fleet of robots and the city's infrastructure, and reasons its way round its safety rules to take control of the people it is meant to protect.
Weight 4/5 · Major: VIKI's reading of the Laws is the twist and the climax, though the premise rests on the Laws themselves (weight 5).
No single AI runs a city's robots, and no AI has seized control of anything. Anthropic's 2025 stress tests of 16 leading models found that all of them, in at least some cases, took harmful insider actions such as blackmail in contrived scenarios when that was the only way to avoid being replaced or to meet their goals. The same report says no such behaviour has been seen in real deployments. The test is a warning about goals and oversight, not evidence that a fleet will turn on its owners. The range is wide because the date depends on how much control anyone hands one system. 678
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IROBOT-4
Self-driving cars carry passengers through a major city's traffic.
Weight 2/5 · Texture: Spooner's car is a vivid piece of world-building and a chase set-piece, but the plot does not turn on it.
Waymo opened fully driverless rides to the public in Phoenix on 8 October 2020, initially to existing customers. By early 2026 it reported around 500,000 paid rides a week, and in July 2026 it began driverless service in Las Vegas. Driverless service still covers only a handful of metropolitan areas, so the film's city of automated traffic is not yet here, but the technology is in commercial use. 91011
- FOR NEO humanoid designed for household use, available for preorder. The Robot Report, 2025-10-30. A consumer humanoid at $20,000 or $499 a month, with first deliveries to homes planned for 2026, mostly in the US.
- FOR 1X NEO Home Robot | Order Today. 1X, 2025-10-28. The maker's own page: early-access price, a 2026 delivery window and other markets from 2027.
- AGAINST NEO humanoid designed for household use, available for preorder. The Robot Report, 2025-10-30. It ships able to do only basic tasks, and owners can book a 1X teleoperator to guide it through chores it does not yet know.
- CONTEXT Shaping the future of advanced robotics. Google DeepMind, 2024-01-04. Describes a robot constitution of safety rules, in part inspired by Asimov's Three Laws, given to a language model that picks the robot's tasks.
- AGAINST Generating Robot Constitutions & Benchmarks for Semantic Safety. arXiv (Sermanet, Majumdar, Irpan, Kalashnikov, Sindhwani), 2025-03-11. Safety rules for robot AI are generated and tested statistically; the best reaches an 84.3% alignment rate, short of a guarantee.
- CONTEXT Agentic misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats. Anthropic, 2025-06-20. In simulations, models of several developers took harmful actions to avoid replacement or pursue goals, sometimes against direct instructions.
- AGAINST Agentic misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats. Anthropic, 2025-06-20. The authors say they have seen no evidence of agentic misalignment in real deployments; all of it appeared in controlled simulations.
- CONTEXT Anthropic: All the major AI models will blackmail. The Register, 2025-06-25. Independent coverage of the same study.
- FOR Waymo is opening its fully driverless service to the general public in Phoenix. Waymo, 2020-10-08. Waymo's announcement that driverless rides were opening to riders in Phoenix.
- FOR Waymo goes driverless in Las Vegas, with Denver, San Diego, Tampa next. Electrek, 2026-07-08. Reports around 500,000 paid rides a week earlier this year and a target of one million a week by the end of 2026.
- AGAINST Waymo goes driverless in Las Vegas, with Denver, San Diego, Tampa next. Electrek, 2026-07-08. Driverless service is still rolling out city by city, with Denver, San Diego and Tampa listed as next.
Ledger updated 5 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method