The Future-Ready Glossary

Robotics: The interdisciplinary study and practice of building robots. This is done by synthesizing several types of engineering, primarily mechanical, electrical, electronic, and computer.

Robots: Automated machines that can perform complex tasks.

Artificial Intelligence: Systems that have the capability of performing tasks that have traditionally required human ingenuity and intelligence. These systems are capable of learning, remembering, reasoning, perceiving, and solving problems.

Machine Learning: The kind of learning that enables systems to automatically learn, identify patterns, and improve from data without being explicitly programmed. Computers learn by identifying correlations and patterns in data.

Deep Learning: The kind of AI that uses artificial neural networks for processing complex data through multiple layers. This results in much superior performance of AI systems, often surpassing human performance.

Doomerism: I first encountered this term in Dario Amodei’s essay “The Adolescence of Technology” written in January 2026. He says, “Here, I mean “doomerism” not just in the sense of believing doom is inevitable (which is both a false and self-fulfilling belief), but more generally, thinking about AI risks in a quasi-religious way.”