Sergey Levine: evaluation

Transcript context

…I guess there's a different question. If the value is bottlenecked by hardware and you just need to produce more hardware, what is the path by which hundreds of millions of robots or billions of robots are being manufactured in the US or with allies? I don't know how to approach that question, but it seems like a different question than, “Well, what is the impact on human wages or something?” For the specifics of how we make that happen, that's a very long conversation that I'm probably not the most qualified to speak to. But in terms of the ingredients, the ingredient here that is important is that robots help with physical things, physical work. If producing robots is itself physical work, then getting really good at robotics should help with that. It's a little circular, of course, and as with all circular things, you have to bootstrap it and try to get that engine going. But it seems like it is an easier problem to address than, for example, the problem of digital devices. Work goes into creating computers, phones, et cetera. But the computers and phones don't themselves help with the work. Right. I guess feedback loops go both ways. They can help you or they can help others and it's a positive sum world. It's not necessarily bad that they help others. But to the extent that a lot of the things which would go into this feedback loop—the sub-component, manufacturing and supply chain, already exist in China—it seems like the stronger feedback loop would exist in China. Then there's a separate discussion. Maybe that's fine, maybe that's good, and maybe they'll continue exporting this to us. But I just find it notable that whenever I talk to guests about different things, it's just like, “Yeah, within a few years the key bottleneck to every single part of the supply chain here will be something that China is the 80% world supplier of.”…

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