I don’t understand even this level of pessimism; robots are already profitable, and they have grown 5x in the past 20 years, to be a $50b industry, and the “coming” wave of investment already started; projections from “optimists” have it growing to $2.5tr by 2035, and they aren’t banking on ASI at all, just current methods working out increasingly well.
I presume you meant humanoid robots not industrial ones and not vacuum cleaners, right?
~85% of the humanoid robots are sold in China, and about 3⁄4 of all the demand in China is from the education and research sectors—including, notably, government-backed training centers which sell the data back to the manufacturers: https://www.ft.com/content/26735a23-315f-47ef-8cf2-6c6ea9713998
Yep, apologies, I meant specifically humanoids or, more broadly, “general-purpose” robots. I take your point that, at least in China, we seem already to have reached an inflection point. My intuition is that robotics today may be roughly where LLMs were in 2023. Not yet broadly economically transformative, but experiencing a rapid surge in investment and technical progress, but with China and the United States effectively swapping places in terms of who is leading the buildout.
I don’t understand even this level of pessimism; robots are already profitable, and they have grown 5x in the past 20 years, to be a $50b industry, and the “coming” wave of investment already started; projections from “optimists” have it growing to $2.5tr by 2035, and they aren’t banking on ASI at all, just current methods working out increasingly well.
I presume you meant humanoid robots not industrial ones and not vacuum cleaners, right?
~85% of the humanoid robots are sold in China, and about 3⁄4 of all the demand in China is from the education and research sectors—including, notably, government-backed training centers which sell the data back to the manufacturers: https://www.ft.com/content/26735a23-315f-47ef-8cf2-6c6ea9713998
Yep, apologies, I meant specifically humanoids or, more broadly, “general-purpose” robots. I take your point that, at least in China, we seem already to have reached an inflection point. My intuition is that robotics today may be roughly where LLMs were in 2023. Not yet broadly economically transformative, but experiencing a rapid surge in investment and technical progress, but with China and the United States effectively swapping places in terms of who is leading the buildout.