Comment by Havoc
19 hours ago
Inclined to disagree.
The winner here will be whoever can move atoms with AI not take notes at the daily standup.
i.e. Think boston dynamics vs unitree
They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify.
We are _miles_ behind successful embodied AI. The demos are cool but the success rates are not high enough.
You can tell we're on the cusp when level 5 self driving cars are common an you have multiple companies deploying them on the street. Google is doing great work but the poured TONS of effort into it and the thing still needs intense stacks of perception and processing. Much more than I've seen any humanoids pour into it.
L5 SDV's are much easier to get than humanoids and the have tangible economic benefit. My thesis is that those will come first.
I'm really curious how quickly we would have huge numbers of L5 SDV if we societally accepted ~equal rates of injury and death, both of passengers and pedestrians. I want to be very clear, I'm not advocating for this (and even if I was, I haven't the faintest idea how one would go about getting society more broadly to go along), but part of me thinks that the primary hold up isn't actually capacity but instead standards.
This doesn't really argue against your point, because the standards are what they are, and like I said, I have no idea how one would go about changing them if one even decided they wanted to. And given what they are, it has taken, as you point out, enormous amounts of effort to reach those standards in a practical way.
That all being said, while I agree that SDV's are in many respects easier than other robotics tasks, they are also somewhat uniquely dangerous. Other categories of task, while potentially more complicated, won't have to worry nearly so much about safety, and so may be operating under a different constraint regime. I think this means that we may see adoption happen at a much more accelerated rate than we have seen in the automotive space.
Will we all be more or less flesh and bot in the future? Robocop style
Standards are not higher for self driving cars. Musk lied a lit about capability and safety of self driving, creating impression that it is safer then humans driving.
So far, they are not.
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Strongly agreed. AI powered drones will be the winning military strategy by 2030.
And why are atoms necessary? You're treating embodiment as the _only justifiable_ commercial path for AI. I don't think that's really close to true. Embodied AI is a subset of current LLM/agentic AI products (or perhaps intersection of something and this new AI?). No reason anything needs to move atoms _directly_ (e.g., via motors) to make a trillion dollars.
The winner is whoever can move the atoms for free, e.g. crack energy.
Mostly agree. I think there is a big time delay though.
If free cheap energy is unlocked today I reckon it would still take a good 30 years for that to ripple through properly.
It solves lots of problems (water!) but doesn't make the heavy machinery to consume it instantly appear.
K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" got a lot of favorable comment when it was published but then it kind of faded from view. Might be worthwhile to revisit it?
> They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify.
Why would an American company outsource manufacturing to China if the labor cost is the same in both places? The entire reason the Chinese manufacturing base exists is to exploit cheap labor.
What would be the point of shipping products across the ocean?
Labor is not the only cost in that equation though, there's business regulations, the cost of the operators/repair that troubleshoot and repair the bots when they break, etc. a lot of which could be cheaper still than the price of a container on a slow ship from China.
China doesn't have to ship parts across the ocean. US manufacturers do, because we gave up the whole bottom/middle of the manufacturing supply chain to China decades ago in pursuit of lower costs. In China, the maker of the parts you need to build your product is a few blocks away. In the US, the maker is in China.
And, if you need changes, you can go talk to them the same day you see a problem.
There are more competitive advantages such as expertise, supply chain, regulations, capable government, scale... If it were all price, there are countries that are much cheaper than China.