Caitlin Kalinowski: prediction

Transcript context

…Coming back to robots and humanoids, something that we were chatting about this earlier, your sense is humanoid robots aren't necessarily the answer to a lot of the problems that we have and opportunities that exist. Talk about just your sense of humanoids versus non-humanoid robots. Yeah. I think there's a hype cycle around humanoids. That doesn't mean they're not extremely interesting, and I think there's going to be winners there. But what I hear a lot is, "I want a generalist robot shape to do everything." I don't know that that works. I think that you need different types of robots to do different types of things. For example, if you've got a laptop and if you want to screw together the keyboard to the case, this is not a job I don't think, for a humanoid. This is a job for a dedicated robot, manufacturing robot that has been designed just to screw 10 screws into a case for this specific laptop and you want to do that 10,000 times a day or something or 10,000 times a week or something. That's a dedicated robot that's specifically intended to do that thing. What I think is interesting here is you can have standard cabinet sizes for automation robots and you can have them be modifiable over time, and that's going to be a very interesting field, I think, is how do you make manufacturing robots that are adaptable and changeable, but you wouldn't want a humanoid to do that. And so, when you really go and look at a modern manufacturing facility like in China, at the top tier of tier one suppliers, there's not very many people on the line anyway. The entire printed circuit board line is essentially got no people on it anymore. The raw board is going through and getting reflowed and getting checked, and the whole thing is being done without humans unless there's something goes wrong and a human runs over and fixes something. So in mechanical assembly, the same thing. These most advanced lines, they don't have people working very much. They used to have 200 people. They might have 10 now. And so, we've already kind of moved past human labor in a lot of this most advanced manufacturing. And so, we don't actually need to replace humans with humanoids. We just need more of these dedicated robots. So my suspicion is we'll have humanoids for some long-tail things that we need to do that humans are currently doing that will be important, but we'll also have robots that are for construction, robots that are for electrical work, robots that are for very low volume assembly maybe, robots for logistics, and most of them are going to look different from each other. That makes all the sense in the world. What I think about as you talk about this is it feels like there's going to be this big moment when a robot can build other robots, and this CAD point you make about where once AI can develop full designs for hardware, that's going to be a big moment. Do you have a sense of just how close we are to this, I don't know, this loop that begins of robots building each other and designing each other?…

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