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| One car in 1900. One horse in 1913 |
In fifteen years, between 1900 and 1915, horses went from providing 95% of transport in the United States, to just 10%.
That was the disruption of the motor vehicle.
The disruption of humanoid robots will have the same effect. Except that this time we are the horses.
Tony Seba has a long history of spot-on predictions.
From his blog post “This time we are the horses”:
The changes, the disruption coming up because the rapid development of humanoid robots, combined with the power of AI, will be the biggest opportunity and also the biggest challenge of humankind.
Just as internal combustion engines gave automobiles the capability to disrupt horses, a convergence of technologies that together create what we call a labor engine is what gives humanoid robots the capability to disrupt human labor. The critical disruptive components of the new labor engine include:
- Sensors (cameras, tilt sensors, pressure sensors, microphones, accelerometers, etc.) to take in sensory data
- Computer hardware and software to process sensory data with powerful AI
- Actuators to move and interact with objects in the environment
- Batteries and power electronics to provide energy for hours of sensing, computing, and moving
Each of these technologies has gotten dramatically cheaper and more powerful in recent years, setting the stage for the disruption of labor.
Over the next 15-20 years, humanoid robots will disrupt human labor throughout hundreds of industries across every major sector of the global economy. The disruption of labor will be among the most profound transformations in human history, and therefore simultaneously represents one of the greatest opportunities and greatest challenges our civilization has ever faced.
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