I’d be interested in an attempt to zoom in specifically on the “repurpose existing factories to make robots” part of the story. You point to WW2 car companies turning into tank and plane factories, and then say maybe a billion humanoid robots per year within 5 years of the conversion.
My wild guesses:
Human-only world: Assume it’s like ww2 all over again except for some reason everyone thinks humanoid robots are the main key to victory:
Then yeah, WW2 seems like the right comparison here. Brief google and look at some data makes me think maybe combat airplane production scaled up by an OOM in 1-2 years early on, and then tapered off to more like a doubling every year. I think what this means is that we should expect something like an OOM/year of increase in humanoid robot production in this scenario, for a couple years? So, from 10,000/yr (assuming it starts today) to a billion/yr 5 years later?
ASI-powered world: Assume ASIs are overseeing and directing the whole process + government is waiving red tape etc. (perhaps because ASI has convinced them it’s a good idea):
So obviously things will go significantly faster with ASI in charge and involved at every level. The question is how much faster. Some thoughts:
ASI probably needs far less on-the-job experience than human companies do, to reach the same level of know-how. Like, maybe if you let it ingest all the data from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Ford, GM, SpaceX, etc. collected over the past two decades, and analyze all that data etc., and if you give it the blueprints and prototypes for the current humanoid robots, it can in a week spit out a blueprint and plan for how to refit existing factories to produce mildly-improved versions of said robots at a run rate of about a million/yr, the plan taking six months to execute on in practice. (So this would mean 2 OOMs in 6 months whereas in the human-only world I was guessing 1 OOM in a year.)
Think about how much faster Elon & his companies seem to be able to get things done compared to various legacy companies, and extrapolate—seems fair to assume that ASI would be at least as far above Elon as Elon is above typical competitor companies. Probably in fact that’s a super conservative assumption. “But muh bottlenecks” --> “The whole point is we are trying to estimate how harshly the bottlenecks bite. They evidently don’t bite harshly enough to stop SpaceX from seemingly going like 5x faster than Blue Origin.” Also, Elon is only one guy, and his companies have a limited number of employees thinking, at human speed who can’t just copy themselves like ASI could.
There’s also ‘sci-fi’ stuff to consider like nanobots etc. I think this should be taken seriously, much more seriously than people outside MIRI seem to take it. I think we basically don’t have a way to upper bound how fast things could go post-ASI, or rather, I think the upper bound looks like Yudkowsky’s bathtub nanotech story.
Overall I’d guess that we would get to a billion/yr humanoid robot production within about a year of ASI, and that the bulk of these robots would be substantially more sophisticated as well compared to present-day robots. And it’s easier for me to imagine things going faster than that, than slower, though perhaps I should also account for various biases that push in the other direction. For now I’ll just hand-wave and hope it cancels out.
Seems like we roughly agree on the human-only case. My thinking was that the profit margin would initially be 90-99%, which would create huge economic incentives. Though incentives and coordination were probably stronger in WW2, which could make things slower. Also 10x per year for 5 years sounds like a lot – helpful to point out they didn’t quite achieve that in WW2.
With ASI, I agree something like another 5x speed-up sounds plausible.
I’m curious how good current robots are compared to where they’d need to be to automate the biggest bottlenecks in further robot production. You say we start from 10,000/year, but is it plausible that all current robots are too clumsy/incapable for many key bottleneck tasks, and that getting to 10,000 sufficiently good robots produced per year might be a long path—e.g. it would take a decade+ for humans? Or are current robots close to sufficient with good enough software?
I also imagine that even taking current robot production processes, the gap between a WW2-era car factory and a WW2-era combat airplane factory might be much smaller than the gap between a car factory and a modern frontier robotics factory, I imagine they are a big step up in complexity.
My impression is that software has been the bottleneck here. Building a hand as dextrous as the human hand is difficult but doable (and has probably already been done, though only in very expensive prototypes); having the software to actually use that hand intelligently and deftly as a human would has not yet been done. But I’m not an expert. Power supply is different—humans can work all day on a few Big Macs, whereas robots will need to be charged, possibly charged frequently or even plugged in constantly. But that doesn’t seem like a significant obstacle.
Re: WW2 vs. modern: yeah idk. I don’t think the modern gap between cars and humanoid robots is that big. Tesla is making Optimus after all. Batteries, electronics, chips, electric motors, sensors… seems like the basic components are the same. And seems like the necessary tolerances are pretty similar; it’s not like you need a clean room to make one but not the other, and it’s not like you need hyperstrong-hyperlight exotic materials for one but not the other. In fact I can think of one very important, very expensive piece of equipment (the gigapress) that you need for cars but not for humanoid robots.
All of the above is for ‘minimum viable humanoid robots’ e.g. robots that can replace factory and construction workers. They might need to be plugged in to the wall often, they might wear out after a year, they might need to do some kinds of manipulations 2x slower due to having fatter fingers or something. But they don’t need to e.g. be capable of hiking for 48 hours in the wilderness and fording rivers all on the energy provided by a Big Mac. Nor do they need to be as strong-yet-lightweight as a human.
Individual humans can make pretty cool mechanical hands — see here. That strongly suggests that dexterous robot hands can make dexterous robot hands, enabling exponential growth even without spinning up new heavy machinery and production lines, I figure.
In the teleoperated robots category (which is what we should be talking about if we’re assuming away algorithm challenges!), Ugo might or might not be vaporware but they mention a price point below $10/day. There’s also the much more hardcore Sarcos Guardian XT (possibly discontinued??). Pricing is not very transparent, but I found a site that said you lease it for $5K/month, which isn’t bad considering how low the volumes are.
Here’s a nice video of a teleoperated robot vacuuming, making coffee, cleaning a table, emptying the dishwasher, washing & drying & folding & hanging laundry, making a bed, etc. They also have a video where it cooks a meal. Pretty impressive! It’s surprising how much you can do without sensitive fingers!
Their website lists a bill of materials for the teleoperated robot of ≈$30K, or ≈$20K if hypothetically there were an AGI teleoperating it (because you wouldn’t need the teleoperation UI parts, or on-board laptop). It’s a one-off made by students.
+1, and also you might be able to get away with being clumsy and slow in many cases as long as the software is smart enough to figure out a way to do the thing eventually.
I’d be interested in an attempt to zoom in specifically on the “repurpose existing factories to make robots” part of the story. You point to WW2 car companies turning into tank and plane factories, and then say maybe a billion humanoid robots per year within 5 years of the conversion.
My wild guesses:
Human-only world: Assume it’s like ww2 all over again except for some reason everyone thinks humanoid robots are the main key to victory:
Then yeah, WW2 seems like the right comparison here. Brief google and look at some data makes me think maybe combat airplane production scaled up by an OOM in 1-2 years early on, and then tapered off to more like a doubling every year. I think what this means is that we should expect something like an OOM/year of increase in humanoid robot production in this scenario, for a couple years? So, from 10,000/yr (assuming it starts today) to a billion/yr 5 years later?
ASI-powered world: Assume ASIs are overseeing and directing the whole process + government is waiving red tape etc. (perhaps because ASI has convinced them it’s a good idea):
So obviously things will go significantly faster with ASI in charge and involved at every level. The question is how much faster. Some thoughts:
ASI probably needs far less on-the-job experience than human companies do, to reach the same level of know-how. Like, maybe if you let it ingest all the data from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Ford, GM, SpaceX, etc. collected over the past two decades, and analyze all that data etc., and if you give it the blueprints and prototypes for the current humanoid robots, it can in a week spit out a blueprint and plan for how to refit existing factories to produce mildly-improved versions of said robots at a run rate of about a million/yr, the plan taking six months to execute on in practice. (So this would mean 2 OOMs in 6 months whereas in the human-only world I was guessing 1 OOM in a year.)
Think about how much faster Elon & his companies seem to be able to get things done compared to various legacy companies, and extrapolate—seems fair to assume that ASI would be at least as far above Elon as Elon is above typical competitor companies. Probably in fact that’s a super conservative assumption. “But muh bottlenecks” --> “The whole point is we are trying to estimate how harshly the bottlenecks bite. They evidently don’t bite harshly enough to stop SpaceX from seemingly going like 5x faster than Blue Origin.” Also, Elon is only one guy, and his companies have a limited number of employees thinking, at human speed who can’t just copy themselves like ASI could.
There’s also ‘sci-fi’ stuff to consider like nanobots etc. I think this should be taken seriously, much more seriously than people outside MIRI seem to take it. I think we basically don’t have a way to upper bound how fast things could go post-ASI, or rather, I think the upper bound looks like Yudkowsky’s bathtub nanotech story.
Overall I’d guess that we would get to a billion/yr humanoid robot production within about a year of ASI, and that the bulk of these robots would be substantially more sophisticated as well compared to present-day robots. And it’s easier for me to imagine things going faster than that, than slower, though perhaps I should also account for various biases that push in the other direction. For now I’ll just hand-wave and hope it cancels out.
Thanks, great comment.
Seems like we roughly agree on the human-only case. My thinking was that the profit margin would initially be 90-99%, which would create huge economic incentives. Though incentives and coordination were probably stronger in WW2, which could make things slower. Also 10x per year for 5 years sounds like a lot – helpful to point out they didn’t quite achieve that in WW2.
With ASI, I agree something like another 5x speed-up sounds plausible.
I’m curious how good current robots are compared to where they’d need to be to automate the biggest bottlenecks in further robot production. You say we start from 10,000/year, but is it plausible that all current robots are too clumsy/incapable for many key bottleneck tasks, and that getting to 10,000 sufficiently good robots produced per year might be a long path—e.g. it would take a decade+ for humans? Or are current robots close to sufficient with good enough software?
I also imagine that even taking current robot production processes, the gap between a WW2-era car factory and a WW2-era combat airplane factory might be much smaller than the gap between a car factory and a modern frontier robotics factory, I imagine they are a big step up in complexity.
My impression is that software has been the bottleneck here. Building a hand as dextrous as the human hand is difficult but doable (and has probably already been done, though only in very expensive prototypes); having the software to actually use that hand intelligently and deftly as a human would has not yet been done. But I’m not an expert. Power supply is different—humans can work all day on a few Big Macs, whereas robots will need to be charged, possibly charged frequently or even plugged in constantly. But that doesn’t seem like a significant obstacle.
Re: WW2 vs. modern: yeah idk. I don’t think the modern gap between cars and humanoid robots is that big. Tesla is making Optimus after all. Batteries, electronics, chips, electric motors, sensors… seems like the basic components are the same. And seems like the necessary tolerances are pretty similar; it’s not like you need a clean room to make one but not the other, and it’s not like you need hyperstrong-hyperlight exotic materials for one but not the other. In fact I can think of one very important, very expensive piece of equipment (the gigapress) that you need for cars but not for humanoid robots.
All of the above is for ‘minimum viable humanoid robots’ e.g. robots that can replace factory and construction workers. They might need to be plugged in to the wall often, they might wear out after a year, they might need to do some kinds of manipulations 2x slower due to having fatter fingers or something. But they don’t need to e.g. be capable of hiking for 48 hours in the wilderness and fording rivers all on the energy provided by a Big Mac. Nor do they need to be as strong-yet-lightweight as a human.
Individual humans can make pretty cool mechanical hands — see here. That strongly suggests that dexterous robot hands can make dexterous robot hands, enabling exponential growth even without spinning up new heavy machinery and production lines, I figure.
In the teleoperated robots category (which is what we should be talking about if we’re assuming away algorithm challenges!), Ugo might or might not be vaporware but they mention a price point below $10/day. There’s also the much more hardcore Sarcos Guardian XT (possibly discontinued??). Pricing is not very transparent, but I found a site that said you lease it for $5K/month, which isn’t bad considering how low the volumes are.
Here’s a nice video of a teleoperated robot vacuuming, making coffee, cleaning a table, emptying the dishwasher, washing & drying & folding & hanging laundry, making a bed, etc. They also have a video where it cooks a meal. Pretty impressive! It’s surprising how much you can do without sensitive fingers!
Their website lists a bill of materials for the teleoperated robot of ≈$30K, or ≈$20K if hypothetically there were an AGI teleoperating it (because you wouldn’t need the teleoperation UI parts, or on-board laptop). It’s a one-off made by students.
+1, and also you might be able to get away with being clumsy and slow in many cases as long as the software is smart enough to figure out a way to do the thing eventually.