#292 Brett Adcock - Shawn Ryan Meets a Humanoid Robot

“Four years ago when I started the company, there was no path for humanoid robots to make it into people's homes in the next 10 years. There was no good story. You had big hydraulic humanoids out there and they're all hand-coded to do certain tasks. What you really need is a cheaper electric humanoid that you basically can use neural nets, use basically an AI-first strategy with. I think we're thankful now, looking back, it feels like we somehow pulled 10 years of the future forward.”

“We have a safety strategy, both intrinsically we want the robot hardware and the robots around humans to just be safe all times. Secondly, there's a bunch of semantic safety and other things that we need that we have either put in place or putting in place now to make the robot just work safe in the environment. If you have a candle at home, you don't want the robot to accidentally knock it over. That's like an intelligence thing in a lot of ways. Or there's a boiling pot of water making sure we're very safe around it.”

“I think you'll see some of the most transformative events and technology happened over the next 36 months we've ever seen in our [lifetime]. I'm watching AI in a human body do human work early. It's early. At some point here this year, we'll have thousands of robots. We have hundreds now. But we need millions of robots to make an impact. That's just gonna take some time, and it's gonna be crazy cool. So we're at the start line of that happening, which is like, how do we get AI out into the physical world at scale?”

“Honestly, in our lifetime, we will be fortunate enough for every human to have a humanoid. Almost like a phone and car. I've had a robot in my house for maybe a couple months, doing work on and off daily, sometimes every other day. My kids wanted it. They wanted it there. They name it. They all had different names for the robot. And yeah, they love it. It's actually a question we're asking in the office of, you have a robot in the home and it's got some character to it, do you want to keep that robot or do you want a new one?”

“We measure GDP per capita per human, but if you're able to make as many synthetic humans, millions, billions, tens of billions of synthetic humans, in the case of the digital world, maybe trillions, that'll lead to the greatest increase in productivity we've ever seen in our lifetime and ultimately reduce goods and service prices to unprecedented levels. Like a true age of abundance.”