When is a Bubble Not a Bubble?
That Was The Week 2024 #14
The Robots Are Coming
Mario Gabriele inspires this week's headline and lead essay. His essay is titled "The Robotics Renaissance" and argues that we are about to enter an "automation supercycle".
We are entering a robotics renaissance.
Over the next decade, intelligent, embodied androids will permeate industrial activities and aspects of everyday life, from assembling cars to folding laundry. The impending robot "population boom" is the result of technological breakthroughs, intense investor appetite, labor cost arbitrage, and long-standing demographic trends.
His essay highlights the fact of shortage of humans due to aging:
America doesn't have a large enough working-age population to support its young and elderly. The increase in the US's "dependency ratio" is not unique - many other advanced countries face similar slumps. While immigration is one solution, robots are another.
The catalyst for the essay is that recent developments in AI and the dexterity of robots are coming together to create some unique opportunities.
Boston Dynamics demonstrated a highly mobile and agile prototype, which is featured below as "Startup of the Week":
The emergence of generalized robots coincides with the steady march of AI. Meta released its Llama 3 models as open source last week, including the all-important detailed weightings. Developers now have free access to models that cost upwards of $10 billion to train. In this week's earnings call, Meta stated its intent to spend big on future AI models, leading to a punishing decline in its share price.
Trends such as Snowflake's release of a coding co-pilot and Slack's integration of AI demonstrate how quickly these new capabilities are being made available to the entire planet.
So, yes, it is quite likely that robots are coming. And they are likely to take on tasks that today require humans alone. I consider this a win for humanity in our never-ending goal to reduce the working day while boosting our living standards. For that to be true, the innovation has to be maintained, and the benefits of the wealth created have to be socially distributed.
The former is inevitable, the latter less so.
The robots are coming, and I bet TikTok will not leave the USA soon. The passage of a bill forcing the sale of TikTok, with the threat of a ban if the sale does not happen, will likely be challenged in court. TikTok will prevail. You heard it here first.
Essays of the Week