What does the future look like?
People asked this question for centuries. Of course, this is something that was kicked into overdrive the last 100 years as we saw a period of great technological advancement.
It is something that only accelerated, with the majority of that move taking place in the last 40 years. The advent of the digital age changed everything.
We are now left wondering, once again, what does the future hold?
I discuss the concept of exponentiality a great deal. Unfortunately, for the major of society, this is something that is not comprehended.
For example, can you grasp OpenAI being a $1 trillion company? That is something that most can understand since it was achieved. With Apple and Microsoft both topping $3 trillion in market cap, 1/3 of that is simple.
With that in mind, how about OpenAI as a $100 trillion company?
That is a bit harder to swallow. Yet, this was the claim of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. He says there might come a day when the company is worth that much.
We will not get into a discussion about whether it will happen or not. The key takeaway is it will only get there through exponential growth.
To achieve go one step further, what is civilization was exponential instead of just companies? What would that require?
Here is where we might be embarking upon a massive shift over the next couple decades.
What will it take to kick this off?
While we see many forecasts out there, the start of civilization on an exponential path could start with as little as 1 million humanoid robots.
Consider the idea of a robot working roughly 7,000 hours per day, at a cost of about $1 per hour. How would this alter the economic output of society?
The first ones would need to be able to build factories and autonomously mine materials. Here is the foundation of the resources for the supply chain. As that is automated, friction is removed, enabling the building of more robots.
Here is the machine building the machines.
With increased manufacturing capacity, we can accelerate the pace of robotic output. Tony Seba believes we are going to see a time when we have over 1 billion robots in operation. To me, this is not an outrageous claim.
Exponentiality comes long before that level though. We have the physical component to the robots but there is also the data side of things.
One of the keys going forward is the amount of data we generate. Many are forecasting how we will find a shortage. The time frame of this happening varies based upon the predictions. However, robots could help to solve this.
Not only do they require data for training but they also can generate it. Consider if we bot has a couple cameras along with other sensors. Each day, for roughly 20 hours, it is feeding data. A great deal might be redundant but, with the production of 1 million, we can see how it grows.
When we combine data with compute, digital output increases. By bridging the digital and physical through robotics, we see the characteristics of the first transposed onto the second.
If we look at the history of the Internet, we see how exponential that world is. Take the last 40 years and consider what happened with processing. Then consider the advancements in the telecommunication systems. Data storage improved greatly as data went on an upward trajectory.
All of this is difficult for our minds to comprehend. There will come a time when hundreds of millions of robots will be rolled off the assembly line, just like smartphones. It will take a while to scale up to that but it is out there on the horizon.
Here is where we start to see how civilization can go exponential. Human shortages no longer are as much of a concern. Economic productivity is not tied to human labor, at least to the degree it is now.
