Automation Delivers Abundance

Our Physical Future

Automation Delivers Abundance

Drones are going to be a very big deal. There are different kinds of drones, not just flying drones. There are swimming drones and walking drones and so on. Think about how drones could affect construction.

Drones won’t be just autonomous. You will be able to teleport into a drone and control something on the other side of the world. Maybe you put it in autonomous mode to walk to a destination. You wake up to find it has arrived at the destination; now you can take over for more precise control.

An interesting movie called Surrogates explores what a really big drone/telepresence future would look like. In the movie, people never leave their homes. Instead, they just connect into a really good-looking drone/telepresent version of themselves and walk around in that. If they’re hit by cars, it doesn’t matter because they can just create new drones and rejuvenate. The impact of drones is very, very underrated.

Every human-to-human interface replaced with a human-to-machine interface reduces the relative importance of social status versus technical competence.

I’ve often thought that the most fundamental way to price things might be energy, measured in joules. How much energy did it take to assemble my phone, to pull the materials out of the ground and shape them into that configuration?

Knowing the joules required to build something would give us a ratio-scale measure of the cost of production. This “true” price system would let us disentangle factors like inflation and subsidies from the physical cost of manufacturing. If it cost 1,000 joules of energy to produce something in 1950s America but one hundred joules today, that’s much better. You could get into the guts of the manufacturing to find the exact spot where the improvement occurred. (Big jumps would be due to something like the Haber process.)

The trickiest part may be pricing human labor. Two people may both consume a sandwich’s worth of energy but have different skills. It makes sense to start with joule-based pricing for already automated processes where physical goods are manufactured in “steady state” at scale.

The defining industrial innovation of the twentieth century was the assembly line. For the twenty-first, it may be industrial robotics. With industrial robotics, management becomes code running automation.

Factories have had robots for quite a while, but advances in robotics have made it possible to automate whole facilities. Even tasks that currently require extreme manual dexterity will soon be done by robot hands.

This will have significant consequences. Among other things, by turning management into code, management now becomes tangible. Soon, managers of an assembly line can replace employee training with scriptable machine images, replace architectural diagrams for assembly line configurations, and think in terms of protocols rather than internal memos.

Communication tasks by the manager now become programs recorded in git logs and database entries. The manager blends into the worker, and the assembly line morphs into a robotic factory scripted by the manager’s instructions in code.

This means far fewer workers, which means far fewer other constraints. For better or for worse, no employment law provisions apply to robots. Robots have no hourly restrictions, minimum wage laws, collective bargaining agreements, or decommissioning restrictions. OSHA’s power over the workplace plummets when there are no workers.

This scenario is alarming, not just to the already embattled US factory worker, but to workers at Chinese companies like Foxconn who may be replaced by robots. As this technological trend accelerates, the capital requirements to produce a product will decline precipitously. To run a small robotic factory could be like running your own data center, well within reach of the individual entrepreneur.