Strange Days: AI and the Next Industrial Revolution HTML PDF
A combinatorial revolution is under way in advanced technologies, driven by the simultaneous maturation of batteries, solar energy, semiconductors, sensors, electric motors and artificial intelligence (AI). AI systems have advanced by a factor of 21 every two years from 2010 to 2026, and autonomous AI agents are now capable of sustained, multistep action. These converging technologies are enabling the development of humanoid robots, with China leveraging its dominant industrial scale and Elon Musk pursuing vertical integration across his AI, energy, space-launch and manufacturing firms. Commercial deployment of these robots will likely begin later in the 2020s and accelerate in the 2030s. The social and strategic implications are significant. Humanoid robots will enter societies already experiencing disruptions from various directions. Labour-market disruption may prove less consequential than the gradual erosion of human agency through incremental delegation to opaque machine systems, particularly in democracies already weakened by the second-order effects of social media.