BIG Technology is emerging now and ramping this decade. Early innovators and adopters will win. Those who invest in the winners will also win. Late adopters will lose badly. Just as those who were earliest on the internet and electric cars were winners.
Early adopting countries won past technological shifts. The ranking of countries is determined by Industrialization levels and energy per capita.
The new technologies are on that scale. They will determine which countries and companies dominate the century.
Electricity, energy and industrialization levels in a country determine the level of wealth in a country. Mechanization is so vital that it sorts and ranks how well a country has performed over the past 200 years. The levels of self driving cars and trucks and humanoid bot adoption will be on that level. The level of bots in a country will determine the per capita wealth.
Innovator and early adopter companies will win and late adopters will be relative losers.
We have seen the BIG winner dynamic play out over the last 25 years with the big winners in internet and smartphones getting a dominating share of overall profits and market value.
The humanoid factory bot, warehouse loading and unloading bots and delivery bots will be established this decade.
This will be how AI and robotics matching humans at physical tasks will transform the economy and multiply the economy hundreds and thousands of times. It is truly the next level of making and moving things.
Multiplying labor will be huge economically.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Robots, 3D printing and different modern intelligent machines will be each year clever, will do more and more independent intelligent work and will be changed for new and more clever robots. But there must be ecological material for new and new robots and machines and materials, because there is not 100% usage for all old elements of these robots and machines and we don’t want more and more plastics in nature, in oceans, trees, human bodies etc. Future awaits only ecological production, not any production.
The real solution to self driving cars is not Tesla developing and AGI (they have no idea how to do that, and the whole FSD thing is partly just done because it generates tonnes of free marketing).
PRT (personal rapid transit) is the idea of creating pods that run on micro monorails that are cheaper to put in the air than rail viaducts or freeway roads. Because the kids have their own right of way where they don’t have to deal with people automation is simpler. These pods can also be used for automatic deliveries , and cities can finally go well beyond having just 2D transport networks.
PRT is a wonderful idea on paper, but will sadly never go anywhere. Too much capital invesment for too little return, and if we have a substantial percentage of the population in it, then we’ll have pod jams just the same as we have cars. Worse, because you generally won’t have three lanes of rails side-by-side like you have asphalt roads today.
Need more details for this
The Tesla bot is a man in a $27 spandex suit, Boston Dynamics has advanced robots, but you choose to show a man in a plastic suit.
The Tesla bot suit costs $99 and won’t fit any man over 5′ 9” inches. A lot of men and women will be buying these suits as the great packing and unpacking jobs disappear as well as the truck-driving jobs. It will be the new form of protest and cargo cult religion. Can anyone tell me where I can invest in this future goldmine?
Immigration paired with automation can help blunt the ratio of workers to retirees for a while.
5.6 M – Warehouse:
1.6 M – Guards / Inspectors
11.5 M – Restaurant / Retail
1.4 M – Farm
2.6 M – Assemblers / Construction
4.5 M – Cleaning / Grounds
4.9 M – Health:
“Immigration paired with automation can help blunt the ratio of workers to retirees for a while.”
No, not really. Only the right kind of immigration and only at the expense of whatever country they are immigrating from.
E.g. in Sweden 50% of immigrants don’t work after 15 years (!) and they remain a net drain on resources. Then at some point they too will retire and be an even bigger drag on the system.
Skilled immigrants come at the expense of wherever they left and encouraging this greatly is a kind of beggar thy neighbour policy that only works if few countries do it. Even skilled immigrants will eventually retire and become a drain on the system; the need for an ever-growing population pyramid is therefor inherently ponzi-scheme like.
“No, not really. Only the right kind of immigration and only at the expense of whatever country they are immigrating from.”
So, it can only help the rich countries in the world who want to have selective immigration.
So… it’s a perfectly effective method that would solve any worker shortage for at least a generation or two.
No, it won’t work for China, or India, because they could’t attract enough good migrants. And it won’t help any rich country that chooses not to select immigrants, but that’s their own stupid decision. (USA, Japan, a few other such places like that)
And it won’t work indefinitely into the future. But half a century is enough to put us beyond our visual horizon anyway. Trying to solve a social problem two generations into the future just gives us ideas like China’s one child policy, because back in 1970 they were worried about overpopulation.
I quite agree with you. The problem we have in the US is letting in high numbers of less educated people. Their children add to our burden for welfare and education but often become highly productive citizens. Issuing H1-B visas for skilled immigrants increases our productivity but also suppress wages for US citizen engineers. Hard to see the best trade off for this.
Growing the population forever just leads to over population like India and China. Earth resources are limited so why do we need more people? Taking care of the elderly is the common excuse but that just produces more elderly. We need robots and to stop most immigration.
Cause and consequence?
It seems much more likely that usually it’s high GDP that creates demand for energy, not energy that creates high GDP.
Russia is an example. It produces net energy in the form of gas that it sells to countries with high energy demands (high gdp countries), while Russia, with lower GDP (medium) can´t use all of it.
I think you are wrong Brian. I’m coming at this from the idea for large growth you need innovation and technology on one side and you need people to buy products on the other. We have only one of those. populations are in decline across the world. We can’t sustain a huge revolution we don’t have the human capital. Many of the countries that have good enough demographics are unstable with food supplies; either because they are unable to grow it or they depend on massive amounts of imports to grow.
Energy expenditure per capita may not be a complete measure. Efficiency has something to do with it, me thinks. For example: One hardly get any positive value out of gas guzzling cars compared to efficient cars. Poorly insulated buildings draw energy for no reason.
Traffic jams, unused waste heat, running a friggin AC in an open yacht etc. etc.
The list is long with items of energy waste that don’t really provide wealth.
The equation should maybe be modified…
Yep
Thats energy efficiency
Also look into The term aggregate efficiency, how good are you at converting energy to value
If you are counting commercial/industrial equipment that produces wealth largely without supervision, or tending, like a CNC lathe equipped with a bar loader, and a parts catcher, you’re right. I had customers that had their homes next to their machine shops, that would fill bar loaders, empty parts bins, turn on the lathe, turn of the lights, and go home for the night. In the event a roughing tool insert got dull, the lathe switched over to a backup tool.
If anything stopped the machine’s production cycle, the owner had a buzzer, and a flashing light in his home.
A tractor that operates itself once it’s set up exists now. I bipedal robot that does maintenance, switches out implements, and fills seed/fertilizer/chemical bins/tanks is a tall order.
If you mean by robot a bipedal device, that replaces waitresses retail workers, fruit/vegetable pickers, and machine assemblers, it’s not going to happen until there is artificial general intelligence on the order of stupid people, or intelligent animals.
I’d say those problems are more difficult than “full self driving” which is far from adoption.
I’d agree that a lot of the jobs we’d want humanoid robots to do require a lot of ‘intelligence’ that may be difficult to give them.
OTOH, I’ve been astounded by the most recent AI/deep learning capabilities in GPT-3 and DALLE-2 that trained on truly vast databases. So maybe it’s just a matter of figuring out how to pull together sufficient training examples for physical activities, to break that problem.
Perhaps my point is better expressed this way. The bipedal body plan is not an inherently good one for any one job. It is a jack of all trades, master of none sort of build. One thing it is good at is if you only have one worker, that must do many jobs. A repair robot on a mission to another planet, for instance.
Machinery, and tools are designed for bipeds, only because that’s how humans are made. If you want a robot to operate the tractor you already own, bipedal would be the best shape for it, because it was designed to be operated by bipeds.
A robot designed for the job it will do, perhaps from a menu of preexisting compatible components will almost always be more cost effective.
The biped walking is advantageous if you are meant to be a long distances walker, not a sprinter.
And I think that’s human’s biological advantage: we can exhaust our prey to death.
The fact a lot of us have become couch potatoes that can’t walk to the grocery shop is just a historical artifact. Our ancestors were pretty good walkers, and that allowed them to roam and survive, eventually filling up the planet.
Ancestors were runners (joggers?), not walkers.
Being able to sweat all over and keep from overheating in the midday sun was a massive advantage in pursuing prey that would overheat under the same conditions.
Another reason we could pursue prey over long distances was because, in general, we were not preyed upon when we ran in packs and carried spears–even apex predators (lions) learned to avoid us. In modern day Africa, lions will avoid even human children carrying long sticks. In fact, until very recently, Maasai boys were required to kill a lion as a rite of passage.
There were speed hunters, ambush hunters, stealth hunters, pack hunters, once we surged back from near extinction with improved hands, brains, and weapons, we were able to use elements of all of these, to one degree or another, as well as creating and exploiting a new niche, endurance hunter.
Heh.
When they came for most of the jobs of people with IQs below 90, I cheered.
When they came for most of the jobs of people with IQs below 100, I cheered some more.
When they came for most of the jobs of people with IQs below 130, I grew concerned.
When they came for most of the jobs of people with IQs below 150, I began to work a lot of overtime and a second job because I was smart enough to figure out I’d probably be getting nothing more than the dole (universal basic income) after the next upgrade.
IQs of 150 are rare, even 130.
The bipedal body plan is absolutely the best for one purpose: working in our current world. Because it can use all our existing tools, drive all our existing vehicles, climb all our existing stairs and ladders, fit through all our existing doors, and fit into in all our existing rooms.
In 100 years, few robots will be humanoid. But for the next decade, humanoid robots are the killer app.
I really wish you are right on this Brian. We’re gonna need it.
And the reason is the upcoming population collapse, with the population pyramid going into a majority of old people for most countries, we will need all the help we can muster to keep our comforts and way of life.
If the future is a robot troop taking the place of human workers, so we can still enjoying electricity, plumbing, heating and Internet at home, and have some assistance with the groceries and cleaning, I’m all for it.
Plumbers and electricians will still be useful careers. However expect automated robot kiosks for shops and more automation for people sitting at counters waiting to ring somebody up. Long haul trucking also seems to the the low hanging fruit of automation while door deliver seems to be something that will be trickier.