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0 pointsbrotchie1y ago0 comments

+1, the second and third order effects aren't trivial.

We're already seeing escape velocity in world modeling (see Google Veo2 and the latest Genesis LLM-based physics modeling framework).

The hardware for humanoid robots is 95% of the way there, the gap is control logic and intelligence, which is rapidly being closed.

Combine Veo2 world model, Genesis control planning, o3-style reasoning, and you're pretty much there with blue collar work automation.

We're only a few turns (<12 months) away from an existence proof of a humanoid robot that can watch a Youtube video and then replicate the task in a novel environment. May take longer than that to productionize.

It's really hard to think and project forward on an exponential. We've been on an exponential technology curve since the discovery of fire (at least). The 2nd order has kicked up over the last few years.

Not a rational approach to look back at robotics 2000-2022 and project that pace forwards. There's more happening every month than in decades past.

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philipkglass1y ago

I hope that you're both right. In 2004-2007 I saw self driving vehicles make lightning progress from the weak showing of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge to the impressive 2005 Grand Challenge winners and the even more impressive performance in the 2007 Urban Challenge. At the time I thought that full self driving vehicles would have a major commercial impact within 5 years. I expected truck and taxi drivers to be obsolete jobs in 10 years. 17 years after the Urban Challenge there are still millions of truck driver jobs in America and only Waymo seems to have a credible alternative to taxi drivers (even then, only in a small number of cities).

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