2023-2025: LLMs prove scaling works, roboticists try to create an “LLM for Robots”. They fail because there’s not enough robot data, and Reinforcement Learning in the real world is too slow.
2026-2032: Vertical robotics companies teleoperate easy tasks to gather volumes of single-task data, train models, automate easy tasks, and make money. They eventually scale to billions in ARR on easy tasks alone. China is the real winner because its supply chains develop rapidly.
2028-2037: Humanoid companies scale to complex tasks by learning from human video plus RL in world models and across deployed robots. America starts a self-reinforcing robotics manufacturing loop to pivot its AI and compute advantage into a hardware advantage. It prioritizes the manufacturing of actuators first, then expanding to the entire stack: mining, refining, machining, assembly, and transportation. But China has the same strategy, and excels at low-cost manufacturing. Societal unrest grows as automation takes more jobs but universal income increases. Humanoids are now manufactured at scale. Assisted by domain-specific video data companies, they disperse into the economy and eventually reap wages in the hundreds of billions.
2030-2045: AI Labs solve adaptive long-term memory and unlock internet-scale data for robots through video models, reaching Embodied General Intelligence (EGI). They acquire humanoid companies for hardware. Humanoids and androids are now fully as capable as humans, and permeate through society. They become farmers, miners, manufacturers, companions, servicepeople, combatants, and more. They learn as they integrate with the world through the new online learning algorithm, adaptive long-term memory, in massive world models and across millions of deployed robots. The US increases universal income, but inequality grows as it competes and coexists with China. Many new ideologies, including Naturalism, Butlerianism, and Transcendism, skyrocket in popularity.
2045+: AI continuously improves by learning from interactions with the real world, and becomes more expert at most tasks than even a human with 40 years of experience. Humans are still valued for power-law skills and relationships, and their innate humanness, so are still present in the economy for healthcare, education, arts, governance, and resource allocation. Humans live more diverse lives than before. The nature of being grows and changes. Humanity asks the right questions and explores the answers.
