Robots could let individuals start small manufacturing businesses

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 13:31

   to the moon, I'll just say this one point, I think physical AI or robotics is really going to be an unlock for people. People think it's like, the companies, the corporations will have all the robots. And the corporations will replace all the people like, but why can't everyone have a robot? Meaning, why can't someone put a robot in their garage? And this robot can do anything, and works 24 hours a day, that robot's now your employee.

2. 13:59

   And you can say to the robot in the garage, hey, I want to make a bicycle shop. I want to make custom bicycles that are really cool. They're like Chrome and people can, you know, kind of tweak them online and make all these different versions of bicycles. And then the robot will build the bicycle. So people, so you can stand up a Shopify store or a Netsy store or whatever, sell bicycles and your robot will make them for you.

3. 14:18

   You don't even have to know how to make bicycles. The robot will order all the parts. It'll order all the machinery it needs. It'll run the robot bike shop in your garage it'll make bikes it'll package them up and ship them out for you when you think about it in that context which is that this diffusion of technology enables everyone to get value from it so everyone will have a robot everyone will be able to have a small business it's like imagine back in the day 20 30 years ago if you told people hey everyone can have an etsy store now all of the knitting you're doing at home you can sell and you can make 50 grand a year no one would have believed you but it's like now you now you can do that have you seen these arm farms no in india no jared Pull up that video I sent you about robots needing a human body.

4. 14:56

   Inside the race to train AI robots how to act. I traveled to southern India to document the rise of AI arm farms, where young engineers strap GoPros to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes to teach humanoid robots how to do chores. So people are getting paid to do normal shit. Here it is. And then the robot learns. Yeah. So this is the same thing that happened with Tesla's full self-drive. Right. That they take the best. I mean, this doesn't strike me as the best folding I've ever seen. But they take the best drivers on Tesla and they use that to train the model on.

5. 15:35

   It would be a good hack to mess with the robots and fold incorrectly over and over again. Or just downstream, loads of people with creased t-shirts. Just mess it all up. This is my way to destroy the t-shirt folding industry. Suddenly in the future, everything you buy is completely broken because everyone trains the robots. But this is everything. This is for everything. This is for making a cup of tea.

6. 15:53

   What's that famous robotics challenge they have? Cracking an egg. The delicacy to hold it and the speed to hit it and the precision to whatever yeah but uh yeah this is this is the future hey look if you need extra cash let it watch you fold your pants and this is obviously transitory so this is the training phase of the robotics the real question is what are people individually going to do so like i know you asked about the moon we'll get that's fine because it was also that anthropic uh uh report that just got released yeah looking at which jobs are going to be popped first by ai and that doesn't even include robotics so i don't think that there's like going to be a successful organized government system to solve this problem to come in and be like hey we're going to stop these industries and they're going to try i mean new york just

7. 16:44

   passed a law making medical advice legal advice all these other things illegal in um through ai tools which by the way you got to ask yourself the question are they really going to be able to do that because if all the models are open sourced and they're all available and i can run them locally why wouldn't i just download a model put it on my computer and i can ask it legal questions through the door and say david what is that what have you got on your computer there you better not be looking at your health reports all of these legal efforts and government efforts to try and stall and stop technology historically it's never worked like it's just not going to work except when you have a limited resource like uranium you know for like nuclear fuel or something like that but um but for like something like this which is self-replicating it's software

8. 17:25

   it can go anywhere it can be anywhere it can fill any space it's knowledge work um it's going to be very hard to stop it. So the real question, and this is going to be transitory for now, but the real question is going to be which of the humans that are folding t-shirts today are going to have the spark in their brain that's going to say, I should buy five robots and run my own t-shirt folding business. That's this challenge that I think humanity faces in this next evolution. We can talk about transhumanism too, which I think is going to be a forced adaptation, but particularly it's about agency. Taking ownership for how do you engage the future versus waiting for someone to tell you what to do next. That's going to be a change of kind, not just a difference of degree. I think that previously, if you were someone who was

9. 18:14

   mucking the horses in the streets of Manhattan, that job goes away. But there's a new business that comes up and your friend decides to go and work there. The agency of I am enough of a self starter with the sovereignty and the determination to go and do this thing, that does feel like the bar is being raised and some people are going to fall below that bar. I don't know if that's true because I do think every human has a degree of innate agency. It's programmed into us as humans.

10. 18:38

    It's just generally been turned off because we've created social systems that have told us, here's what you're going to get next and here's what you're going to get next and here's what you're going to get next. Since we're children, we've been programmed by our education, by college, by the work system, by the economy, by the taxes, by the fact that the government's supposed to give me all this shit. Every step of the way, I'm being told, do this, you'll get this, do this, you'll get this. You've never been given the freedom as a human to operate. And I think this is fundamentally true with social systems. We've created government systems, financial systems, everything. We've been very severely limited as people. I think one example that speaks positively to my point is what's happened with people making money on TikTok and Instagram and Shopify and Etsy.

11. 19:20

    If you told someone, pick the time frame, 15 years ago, that X number of millions of Americans would be making on average tens of thousands of dollars a year doing the things they're doing, posting photos of themselves in bikinis and at historic monuments on Instagram with a sports drink or whatever next to them, or people were making money podcasting with the scale that they are today. you're the prime example or people were making money selling home goods and making 300 grand a year selling their custom cat blankets or pick pick pick pick pick these things you would have never believed it but every person has that in them every person has that capacity in them to do something unique to do something special, to take agency if they're given the right space to do it and they're not told that you can't do it.

12. 20:07

    Interesting point on that. I wonder how many people are going to have their agency diminish because of their reliance on AI. So I wonder if the very thing that's going to enable them