Prediction update

In mid-2009 I said:

Personally, I still don't see I Robot coming to life any time soon, but I do see things that got written off as impossible during the dead-and-debunked phase starting to stir to life again. I'm thinking, say, competent machine translation or robots that can pick things up and carry them around a house, happening gradually in the next decade or so.

So we're about 70% of the way there now.  I retried the round-trip translations from this post with a popular translation tool and got considerably better results, maybe even what you might call "competent".  I don't see any signs of thing-lugging robots appearing in the stores as mass-market consumer products in the next couple of years, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere is selling such a thing before long -- or has already.

That's the nice thing about vague predictions -- it all depends on how you count.