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Inclined to disagree. The winner here will be whoever can move atoms with AI not take notes at the daily standup. i.e. Think boston dynamics vs unitree They'

by Havoc 6mo ago

Inclined to disagree. The winner here will be whoever can move atoms with AI not take notes at the daily standup. i.e. Think boston dynamics vs unitree They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify.

euroderf 6mo ago
K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" got a lot of favorable comment when it was published but then it kind of faded from view. Might be worthwhile to revisit it?
RealityVoid 6mo ago
We are _miles_ behind successful embodied AI. The demos are cool but the success rates are not high enough. You can tell we're on the cusp when level 5 self driving cars are common an you have multiple companies deploying them on the street. Google is doing great work but the poured TONS of effort into it and the thing still needs intense stacks of perception and processing. Much more than I've seen any humanoids pour into it. L5 SDV's are much easier to get than humanoids and the have tangible economic benefit. My thesis is that those will come first.
- MostlyStable 6mo ago
  I'm really curious how quickly we would have huge numbers of L5 SDV if we societally accepted ~equal rates of injury and death, both of passengers and pedestrians. I want to be very clear, I'm not advocating for this (and even if I was, I haven't the faintest idea how one would go about getting society more broadly to go along), but part of me thinks that the primary hold up isn't actually capacity but instead standards. This doesn't really argue against your point, because the standards are what they are, and like I said, I have no idea how one would go about changing them if one even decided they wanted to. And given what they are, it has taken, as you point out, enormous amounts of effort to reach those standards in a practical way. That all being said, while I agree that SDV's are in many respects easier than other robotics tasks, they are also somewhat uniquely dangerous. Other categories of task, while potentially more complicated, won't have to worry nearly so much about safety, and so may be operating under a different constraint regime. I think this means that we may see adoption happen at a much more accelerated rate than we have seen in the automotive space.
  - DiscourseFan 6mo ago
    Will we all be more or less flesh and bot in the future? Robocop style
  - watwut 6mo ago
    Standards are not higher for self driving cars. Musk lied a lit about capability and safety of self driving, creating impression that it is safer then humans driving. So far, they are not.
    - MostlyStable 6mo ago
      I have no idea where you get this impression. Tesla is no where close to the majority (or even plurality) of fully autonomous self driving miles. Waymo is dramatically safer (less injuries, not quite enough data yet to be certain about fatalities, but they are lower than average, we just can't yet claim statistical significance) than human drivers. I haven't seen good stats on Tesla (they are less transparent than Waymo), but it would shock me if they weren't also at least slightly safer than the average human driver. Human drivers are really bad at driving. But even if Tesla isn't safer, taken as a whole, the self driving industry as it currently exists still probably is, purely because it's mostly Waymo, and Waymo is dramatically safer.
      - cman1444 6mo ago
        I have a suspicion that, once self-driving cars make up the lion's share of driving, accidents caused by humans will actually increase on a per-mile driven basis. I think humans will eventually fall out of practice of driving when they use SDVs for most travel. And then every once in a while they'll take their ol' 2026 classic car from highschool out for a spin and find they have forgotten how to drive!
- RetroTechie 6mo ago
  Too narrow view: "Moving atoms" can refer to anything that a) touches the physical world, b) has 'eyes' (camera/microphone/Lidar/IR/UV/whatever) and c) requires some brains. Dark factories exist. This will expand into other areas like logistics, farming, food delivery, maintenance/cleaning jobs, household equipment, etc etc. Over time, blue collar jobs face the same fate. A lot of this will be powered by AI systems running locally on commodity hardware. And this is where China is leading: They've got the factories. They build the robots. They make the ICs with integrated video capture & AI features. They fabricate the circuit boards those ICs go on. And they lead in the small/local AI models to run those. To compete, US would need to re-shore manufacturing which takes decades. Same for EU countries (which have great potential imho if they weren't so slooooww to act & would focus on doing vs. regulate). Never mind that the billions poured into AI by US companies, are targetting white collar/creative jobs, with the AI part as a cloud service. Or military applications. Not (so much) the manufacturing / logistics etc side of things.
  - RealityVoid 6mo ago
    Ah, see, I agree with you more than you think. Industrial automation _is_ super useful and it happens right now. But it's not really the latest AI wave that is the most important in that. And my point is that before the general humanoids work, there are lower hanging fruits to pick.
oceanplexian 6mo ago
> They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify. Why would an American company outsource manufacturing to China if the labor cost is the same in both places? The entire reason the Chinese manufacturing base exists is to exploit cheap labor. What would be the point of shipping products across the ocean?
- rtkwe 6mo ago
  Labor is not the only cost in that equation though, there's business regulations, the cost of the operators/repair that troubleshoot and repair the bots when they break, etc. a lot of which could be cheaper still than the price of a container on a slow ship from China.
- SwellJoe 6mo ago
  China doesn't have to ship parts across the ocean. US manufacturers do, because we gave up the whole bottom/middle of the manufacturing supply chain to China decades ago in pursuit of lower costs. In China, the maker of the parts you need to build your product is a few blocks away. In the US, the maker is in China. And, if you need changes, you can go talk to them the same day you see a problem.
- amunozo 6mo ago
  There are more competitive advantages such as expertise, supply chain, regulations, capable government, scale... If it were all price, there are countries that are much cheaper than China.
jvanderbot 6mo ago
And why are atoms necessary? You're treating embodiment as the _only justifiable_ commercial path for AI. I don't think that's really close to true. Embodied AI is a subset of current LLM/agentic AI products (or perhaps intersection of something and this new AI?). No reason anything needs to move atoms _directly_ (e.g., via motors) to make a trillion dollars.
hx8 6mo ago
Strongly agreed. AI powered drones will be the winning military strategy by 2030.
jasondigitized 6mo ago
The winner is whoever can move the atoms for free, e.g. crack energy.
- Havoc 6mo ago
  Mostly agree. I think there is a big time delay though. If free cheap energy is unlocked today I reckon it would still take a good 30 years for that to ripple through properly. It solves lots of problems (water!) but doesn't make the heavy machinery to consume it instantly appear.

by Havoc 6mo ago

euroderf 6mo ago

K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" got a lot of favorable comment when it was published but then it kind of faded from view. Might be worthwhile to revisit it?

RealityVoid 6mo ago

We are _miles_ behind successful embodied AI. The demos are cool but the success rates are not high enough. You can tell we're on the cusp when level 5 self driving cars are common an you have multiple companies deploying them on the street. Google is doing great work but the poured TONS of effort into it and the thing still needs intense stacks of perception and processing. Much more than I've seen any humanoids pour into it. L5 SDV's are much easier to get than humanoids and the have tangible economic benefit. My thesis is that those will come first.

MostlyStable 6mo ago
I'm really curious how quickly we would have huge numbers of L5 SDV if we societally accepted ~equal rates of injury and death, both of passengers and pedestrians. I want to be very clear, I'm not advocating for this (and even if I was, I haven't the faintest idea how one would go about getting society more broadly to go along), but part of me thinks that the primary hold up isn't actually capacity but instead standards. This doesn't really argue against your point, because the standards are what they are, and like I said, I have no idea how one would go about changing them if one even decided they wanted to. And given what they are, it has taken, as you point out, enormous amounts of effort to reach those standards in a practical way. That all being said, while I agree that SDV's are in many respects easier than other robotics tasks, they are also somewhat uniquely dangerous. Other categories of task, while potentially more complicated, won't have to worry nearly so much about safety, and so may be operating under a different constraint regime. I think this means that we may see adoption happen at a much more accelerated rate than we have seen in the automotive space.
- DiscourseFan 6mo ago
  Will we all be more or less flesh and bot in the future? Robocop style
- watwut 6mo ago
  Standards are not higher for self driving cars. Musk lied a lit about capability and safety of self driving, creating impression that it is safer then humans driving. So far, they are not.
  - MostlyStable 6mo ago
    I have no idea where you get this impression. Tesla is no where close to the majority (or even plurality) of fully autonomous self driving miles. Waymo is dramatically safer (less injuries, not quite enough data yet to be certain about fatalities, but they are lower than average, we just can't yet claim statistical significance) than human drivers. I haven't seen good stats on Tesla (they are less transparent than Waymo), but it would shock me if they weren't also at least slightly safer than the average human driver. Human drivers are really bad at driving. But even if Tesla isn't safer, taken as a whole, the self driving industry as it currently exists still probably is, purely because it's mostly Waymo, and Waymo is dramatically safer.
    - cman1444 6mo ago
      I have a suspicion that, once self-driving cars make up the lion's share of driving, accidents caused by humans will actually increase on a per-mile driven basis. I think humans will eventually fall out of practice of driving when they use SDVs for most travel. And then every once in a while they'll take their ol' 2026 classic car from highschool out for a spin and find they have forgotten how to drive!
RetroTechie 6mo ago
Too narrow view: "Moving atoms" can refer to anything that a) touches the physical world, b) has 'eyes' (camera/microphone/Lidar/IR/UV/whatever) and c) requires some brains. Dark factories exist. This will expand into other areas like logistics, farming, food delivery, maintenance/cleaning jobs, household equipment, etc etc. Over time, blue collar jobs face the same fate. A lot of this will be powered by AI systems running locally on commodity hardware. And this is where China is leading: They've got the factories. They build the robots. They make the ICs with integrated video capture & AI features. They fabricate the circuit boards those ICs go on. And they lead in the small/local AI models to run those. To compete, US would need to re-shore manufacturing which takes decades. Same for EU countries (which have great potential imho if they weren't so slooooww to act & would focus on doing vs. regulate). Never mind that the billions poured into AI by US companies, are targetting white collar/creative jobs, with the AI part as a cloud service. Or military applications. Not (so much) the manufacturing / logistics etc side of things.
- RealityVoid 6mo ago
  Ah, see, I agree with you more than you think. Industrial automation _is_ super useful and it happens right now. But it's not really the latest AI wave that is the most important in that. And my point is that before the general humanoids work, there are lower hanging fruits to pick.

oceanplexian 6mo ago

> They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify. Why would an American company outsource manufacturing to China if the labor cost is the same in both places? The entire reason the Chinese manufacturing base exists is to exploit cheap labor. What would be the point of shipping products across the ocean?

rtkwe 6mo ago
Labor is not the only cost in that equation though, there's business regulations, the cost of the operators/repair that troubleshoot and repair the bots when they break, etc. a lot of which could be cheaper still than the price of a container on a slow ship from China.
SwellJoe 6mo ago
China doesn't have to ship parts across the ocean. US manufacturers do, because we gave up the whole bottom/middle of the manufacturing supply chain to China decades ago in pursuit of lower costs. In China, the maker of the parts you need to build your product is a few blocks away. In the US, the maker is in China. And, if you need changes, you can go talk to them the same day you see a problem.
amunozo 6mo ago
There are more competitive advantages such as expertise, supply chain, regulations, capable government, scale... If it were all price, there are countries that are much cheaper than China.

jvanderbot 6mo ago

And why are atoms necessary? You're treating embodiment as the _only justifiable_ commercial path for AI. I don't think that's really close to true. Embodied AI is a subset of current LLM/agentic AI products (or perhaps intersection of something and this new AI?). No reason anything needs to move atoms _directly_ (e.g., via motors) to make a trillion dollars.

hx8 6mo ago

Strongly agreed. AI powered drones will be the winning military strategy by 2030.

jasondigitized 6mo ago

The winner is whoever can move the atoms for free, e.g. crack energy.

Havoc 6mo ago
Mostly agree. I think there is a big time delay though. If free cheap energy is unlocked today I reckon it would still take a good 30 years for that to ripple through properly. It solves lots of problems (water!) but doesn't make the heavy machinery to consume it instantly appear.