Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…A really good question. I’ve thought about this a lot, actually. There’s two technologies that are obviously going to converge. The first are these Anybots or Double Robotics-type things, which are basically like an iPad on wheels, which you can remotely control like a video game, roll it around, et cetera. The second are the Boston Dynamics–style humanoid robots, which can do grasping and other kinds of things. They’ve got a humanoid form factor. Eventually, those two technologies plus a VR bodysuit are going to be combined, such that you can, maybe in 10 years, script a robot from around the world. You’ll be able to basically see through the eyes of the robot, and you can actually actuate it and move the arms through the VR bodysuit. I’ve done this giving a talk, by the way. I don’t know how it was for the audience, but it does, in some literal sense, work. Right. The thing is that the robotics have to be better. The bandwidth has to be better. All that stuff has to be better. And when it does get better, an interesting thing happens. Your immigration policy becomes your firewall. That is to say, someone can “immigrate” to your country over an internet connection, connect to a robot, animate it, and start walking it around. Now your ability to interdict those internet connections is your immigration policy. That has massive implications for all kinds of things. Among other things, you wouldn’t have to travel thousands of miles to get a job as a day laborer. You could literally comparison shop between jurisdictions. Even migrant work–type labor could eventually become software, which is really amazing because then they could get a higher wage. Potentially, they could always go to the best market. There’s going to be some really interesting things that happen with telepresence in the medium term. We’re not there yet, about 5 to 10 years.…

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