Carl Shulman: prediction

Transcript context

…With robots that are optimally operated by AI, extremely finely operated and building technological designs and equipment and facilities under AI direction. How much can they produce? For a doubling you need the AIs to produce stuff that is, in aggregate, at least equal to their own cost. So now we're pulling out these things like labor costs that no longer apply and then trying to zoom in on what these capital costs will be. You're still going to need the raw materials. You're still going to need the robot time building the next robot. I think it's pretty likely that with the advanced AI work they can design some incremental improvements, and with the industry scale up, you can get 10 fold and better cost reductions by making things more efficient and replacing the human human cognitive labor. Maybe you need $5,000 of costs under our current environment. But the big change in this world is, we're trying to produce this stuff faster. If we're asking about the doubling time of the whole system in say one year, if you have to build a whole new factory to double everything, you don't have time to amortize the cost of that factory. Right now you might build a factory and use it for 10 years and buy some equipment and use it for five years. That's your capital cost and in an accounting context, you depreciate each year a fraction of that capital purchase. But if we're trying to double our entire industrial system in one year, then those capital costs have to be multiplied. So if we're going to be getting most of the return on our factory in the first year, instead of 10 years weighted appropriately, then we're going to say okay our capital cost has to go up by 10 fold. Because I'm building an entire factory for this year's production. It will do more stuff later but it's most important early on instead of over 10 years and so that's going to raise the cost of that reproduction. It seems like going from the current decade long cycle of amortizing factories and fabs and shorter for some things, the longest are things like big buildings. Yeah, that could be a 10 fold increase from moving to a double the physical stuff each year in capital costs. Given the savings that we get in the story from scaling up the industry, from removing the [unclear] to human cognitive labor and then just adding new technological advancements and super high quality cognitive supervision, applying more of it than was applied today. It looks like you can get cost reductions that offset that increased capital capital cost. Your $50,000 improved robot arms or industrial robots can do the work of a human factory worker. It would be the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars. By default they would cost more than the $50,000 today, but then you apply all these other cost savings and it looks like you then get a period of robot doubling time that is less than a year. I think significantly less than a year as you get into it. day, but then you apply all these other cost savings and it looks like you then get a period of robot doubling time that is less than a year. I think significantly less than a year as you get into it. So in this first first phase you have humans under AI direction and existing robot industry and converted auto industry and expanded facilities making robots. In less than a year you've produced robots until their combined production is exceeding that of humans’ arms and feet and then you could have a doubling time period of months. [unclear] That's not to say that's the limit of the most that technology could do because biology is able to reproduce at faster rates and maybe we're talking about that in a moment, but if we're trying to restrict ourselves to robotic technology as we understand it and cost falls that are reasonable from eliminating all labor, massive industrial scale up, and historical kinds of technological improvements that lowered costs, I think you you can get into a robot population industry doubling in months. Got it. And then what is the implication of the biological doubling times? This doesn't have to be biological, but you can do Drexler-like first principles, how much would it cost to build both a nanotech thing that could build more nanobots?…

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