Transcription
We've all been wondering what's going to happen over the next 10 or 20 years. I mean, only if only we had a crystal ball. What will happen? Well, Tony C. has just told us.
Now, C. has made many predictions which have come true, and people thought they were crazy. They thought they were just absolutely mind-blowingly insane, until, wow, funny enough, it happened. So, if you want to know what's going to happen over the next 10, 20, even 30 years, well, Tony C. has just told us.
Now, insanely, this information has been up on the internet for a couple of days, and almost no one has even noticed. This is absolutely mind-blowing information which will tell you with almost zero uncertainty exactly what is going to go on over the next 10 to 20 years. And it's actually quite mind-blowing, a little bit frightening, and also very, very intriguing.
The media, they report complete horseshit. Just constantly, you're reading nonsense. That's what's on YouTube primarily. It's what the, the mass media is feeding you. But Tony C. and Rethink X and his team have just revealed what is going to happen in the future. I mean, literally spelled it out. These guys have made predictions which have come true, uh, on nearly every occasion.
Now, since 2014, if you want to get rich, just basically listen to what they're saying, and you can bet that almost certainly their predictions will be correct. However, what the media has not done is report on C.'s predictions that came out two days ago, and they should have, because that, my friends, is the true answer to where the world is heading. And it's a little bit scary. You know what? C. is not sugarcoating it. He's, um, he's telling what's really going to happen. I think we, we all should be a little concerned.
Here's the truth from Tony C. Hello, my friends. Welcome to the channel. I'm Sam Evans. You're watching the Electric Viking. It's great to see you. I was inspired by Tony C. to create this channel. So, I used to sit at home and watch him speak, and not just him, but other, other professors, and also by Singularity University, Peter Diamandis. And, you know what? They made me realize the world was changing at the fastest pace in human history. And this is, in some ways, good, and in some ways, bad. But it's better to be educated. And listening to the media, who are completely disinterested in anything that's of any real substance, will probably rot your brains.
C. says that in the 15 years between 1907 and 1922, horses went from providing 95% of all private vehicle miles traveled on American roads to less than 20%. 95% to less than 20% in a very short space of time. In areas like New York City, which led to the adoption of automobiles, the disruption of transportation was swift and transformative, as shown in these images. Um, automobiles within only 13 years, basically completely replaced horses in major cities.
The disruption of horses by automobiles in the 20th century followed a characteristic pattern that we have seen throughout history, says C. Adoption of the new technology follows an S-shaped growth curve, while abandonment of the older technology collapses accordingly. Together, these form what Rethink X calls a disruption X curve. Disruptions of all kinds follow this same pattern. Elon Musk is talking about this lately. Um, C. has been mentioning this, and it seems like people just aren't listening.
We are on the cusp, says C., of a new disruption: physical labor performed by humanoid farm robots. This time, we are the horses. We are about to be replaced. Now, I've Googled this on Reddit. There's people talking about this stuff on Reddit. They're all saying, "Don't worry, um, you'll be able to be retrained, and you can just do a different job." No. Yeah, that has happened for the last 200, 300, 400 years. You've been able to be retrained. New, new machines come in, and people work out how to use those machines, and they, that's not going to happen this time, says C. You should be very, very concerned. You should be investing everything you can right now.
Just as internal combustion engines gave automobiles the capability to disrupt horses, a convergence of technologies that together create what we call a labor engine is what gives humanoid robots the capability to completely disrupt human labor. The critical disruptive components of the new labor engine include sensors, cameras, tilt sensors, pressure sensors, microphones, accelerometers, um, every kind of sensor you can imagine, and they are remarkably cheap. Computer hardware and software to process sensory data with powerful artificial intelligence. We have never seen the kind of artificial intelligence, um, before, and it's coming much, much faster than we realize. Actuators to move and interact with objects in the environment. Batteries and power electronics to provide energy for hours of sensing, computing, and moving.
These new humanoid robots, they can learn at a pace a billion times faster than any human being that's ever been born in human history. That includes Elon Musk. That includes Albert Einstein. They learn from each other instantly. You cannot possibly dream of competing with that. Each of these technologies has gotten dramatically cheaper and more powerful in recent years, setting the stage for disruption of labor worldwide.
This is what Tesla is planning to capitalize on. Now, maybe thinking the Tesla Bot, H, it's not as capable as what it should be compared to other robots. It's not really about that. It's about the artificial intelligence, about the neural networks involved here. And Tesla believes it can essentially do what C. is predicting and completely disrupt the global labor market, which is worth trillions of dollars.
Over the next 15 to 20 years, says C., humanoid robots will disrupt human labor throughout hundreds of industries across every major sector of the global economy. You're not safe. The disruption of labor will be among the most profound transformations in human history, and therefore simultaneously represent one of the greatest opportunities and greatest challenges our civilization has ever faced.
Now, what do you think? Elon Musk has been talking about, um, people, people basically having what he calls UBI, which is Universal Basic Income. Elon Musk has been talking about this for more than 10 years. UBI, UBI, UBI. People will need a Universal Basic Income because they will be well replaced or displaced.
C. says that the humanoid robot labor disruption is inevitable. Throughout history, every time technology has enabled a 10 times or greater cost reduction relative to the incumbent system, a disruption has always followed. Each dollar spent on an automobile or an LED light bulb or a digital camera delivers more than 10 times the utility of each dollar spent on a horse, incandescent bulb, a film camera, respectively. For millennia, these and hundreds of other disruptive technologies have driven sweeping transformations across every aspect of human life.
Put it very simply: the cost investment to build a human robot in the future will be a fraction of the value it can provide. Basically, building, say, a Tesla Bot might cost Tesla $10,000, but that bot could create millions of dollars in value. It doesn't call in sick to work. It doesn't complain. It learns every day from every other robot working on the factory floor in every factory, possibly for that brand worldwide. It can work 24 hours a day. It doesn't need to sleep. Humans cannot possibly compete with this technology.
Today, we are on the cusp of the most profound disruption of human labor since the Advent of electricity and combustion engines over a century ago, says C. As in many markets, there will be high-end and low-end humanoid robot offerings. Once deployment begins in earnest, for the purposes of illustration, says C., consider a humanoid robot with a total lifetime cost of $200,000 that works 20,000 hours before decommissioning. It's, its labor cost would be $10 per hour. Even at this very high cost point, humanoid robots are already competitive with human labor in a substantial fraction of the global economy. In reality, lifetime cost of humanoid robots are likely to be far less than $200,000 right from the start. Uh, Tesla is saying that they plan on selling a Tesla Bot literally for the price of a car, and that's a lot less than $200,000.
C. says that humanoid robots will enter the market at a cost capability of under $10 an hour for their labor, and they won't get tired, on a trajectory to under $1 an hour before 2035, and under 10 cents per hour before 2045. Could you potentially, could anyone, even in the third world, I mean, even in the developing world, compete with a humanoid bot that works out at 10 cents or less per hour? Uh, this is what C. is predicting. He's saying that basically we have 20 years left before it's game over for humans. He's even saying that we don't really have 20 years, because on a trajectory to under $1 an hour before 2035.
Now, C. has gotten most of his predictions right. He's even been a little conservative. If he's saying 2035, under $1 an hour, I mean, even if he's off base and it's $5 an hour, can you compete with that? Are you willing to work for $4 an hour and work harder than a robot and not complain, and, uh, not get paid union fees and all this stuff? I mean, honestly, if this is true, and I suspect it is, because this is Tony C. we're talking about, then, uh, I don't know what I need to do. I need to do something, 'cause a robot will replace me too. This alone makes the disruption of a substantial fraction of human labor inevitable.
C. says that humanoid robots will work more than three times as many hours per week as a person in any conditions, dangerous conditions in particular, without vacations, without illnesses, without complaint, for a total of perhaps 7,000 hours per year. But at the same time, that costs are falling, capability will grow. At first, he says, humanoid robots will only be able to perform relatively simple tasks, but with each day that passes, their capabilities will grow until by the 2040s, they will be able to do virtually anything a human can do, and much, much more. Feel like being, um, for example, a doctor and an engineer, and also a teacher in the one person. There's probably a few people that can do all those things, but not very many.
C. says, remember, remember that humanoid robots today are the most expensive and least capable that they will ever be. He's right. I mean, tomorrow they'll get better and cheaper, and the next day, and the next day. Humanoid robots are what Rethink X calls a disruption from below. Initially, they will be cheaper per hour than hiring a human worker in many regions, but also less capable, slower, less competent, less adaptable. We have seen disruptions from below many times before, such as digital cameras. It's true, digital cameras did kind of suck at the start, didn't they? And the response from incumbents is predictable. They mock the new technology. I've seen this on Reddit. They mock it for being lower performing, while ignoring the rate at which the new technology gets better and cheaper until it is too late to respond, and they face collapse. It's a little bit like what people have done with electric cars. They mocked them. They said they were golf carts. Well, look what's happened.
C. says that the disruption will create an entirely new labor system. This is what we call a phase change disruption. Phase change disruptions create entirely new and much larger systems with new properties, new business models, and new metrics. Electricity wasn't just cheaper whale oil, says C. Automobiles weren't just faster horses. Farming wasn't just more productive hunting and gathering. It was an entirely new paradigm. And the, the internet wasn't just an easier way to send letters, read newspapers, or listen to music. These disruptions created vastly larger and more capable systems of energy, transportation, food, and information, delivering orders of magnitude more kilowatt hours, passenger and freight miles, calories, and pictures, news stories, songs, shows, and other content, respectively. The new systems had radically different properties that required new metrics to measure, new business models to utilize, and new institutions to govern.
Today, it's happening again. Solar, wind, and batteries won't just displace fossil fuels; they will create an entirely new energy system. Autonomous electric vehicles won't just displace combustion engines; they will create an entirely new transportation system. Precision fermentation and cellular agriculture won't just replace animal agriculture; they will create an entire new food system. And humanoid robots won't just displace human robots or human jobs; instead, they will create an entirely new and vastly larger and more capable labor system.
Now, whilst there are a lot of negatives to this, guys, some of the positives will be an enormous increase in GDP, in production. Um, actual production worldwide will skyrocket. We're looking at increases of, you know, China's trying to grow at 5, 6, 7%. We look at potential increases of 20, 30, 40% per year. Now, C. didn't say that, by the way, just so you know. This is what I think will happen. It is impossible to know in advance to see with the full details of how the new labor system will differ from today. But the key feature is the marginal cost of labor will rapidly approach zero.
Now, this is why I originally called this channel the Electric Singularity because I believe the singularity will occur, and we'll see an enormous creation of wealth worldwide. This will lead to the complete eradication of poverty. I know there's a lot of people who believe this is insane, and I'm just being an optimist, but I believe poverty will be completely eradicated, and our standard of living for all 7 billion people on the Earth will, within a probably less than a decade, increase to the point of complete, today's Western civilization. I believe that this will all occur within a very short space of time, much like it did in China, where the entire country was brought out of poverty within only about a decade.
C. says that from this new transformation, many other new system properties and behaviors will follow. Just like when the internet and digital technologies reduce the marginal cost of information and communications to near zero, the disruption of labor, he says, is about tasks, though not jobs. History shows that disruptions require new metrics. Incandescent light bulbs used to be sold according to how much power they consumed. Bulbs typically used in homes might be rated 40 watts for use in storage areas, 60 watts for living areas, or 100 watts for large rooms that need lots of illumination. He says that when the first LED light bulbs were introduced to the market, people quickly realized that the old metrics were no longer useful. LEDs consume so much less energy than incandescents that they could not be easily compared to the old bulbs based on their power consumption. Instead, the new bulbs were simply rated according to how much light they emitted in lumens and the color of the light they produced on a scale called color temperature, measured in degrees Kelvin.
In the case of humanoid robots, the old and misleading metric is jobs. And I, I think it's a little bit like what Jim Rohn says about the perception we have of what we do. We believe that we are paid based on an hourly wage or a salary, but actually, we're paid based on value. So, this paradigm will change to the perception where everything will be done based on value.
Most jobs involve much more than performing a single task, he says. They typically entail responsibility for a range of tasks, each of which requires a different amount of training, experience, and skill to perform. They have come with complex contractual obligations on the part of both employer and employee, and they are deeply intertwined with an individual's career, identity, and even their community and culture. So long as humanoid robots are not sentient, they will not have jobs; they will only perform tasks. The disruption of labor, with all of its world-changing implications, can therefore only be understood with tasks as the correct unit of analysis, and task per hour per dollar as the corresponding cost capability metric.
In the beginning of the disruption, the tasks the robot can perform will be narrow. The hours it can work within its useful operational life before decommissioning will be limited to just a few years' worth, and their upfront costs will be fairly high. But each of these elements of their key cost capability metric will improve rapidly and substantially over the next 10 years. Do remember the original phones, you know, massive bricks, huge things. Compare them to how expensive they were. They were thousands of dollars, meaning in probably today's money, they were more than $15 to $20,000. Well, look what we have today. Things changed drastically as a result of all these changes.
C. says that all products and services will get cheaper. He says labor is an essential input into every link of every supply chain of every product and service across the entire global economy. That means as the cost of labor falls, so will the cost of everything else. This would hold true as humanoid robots are deployed at scale, even if the cost capability of humanoid robots will also be improving at the same time and dramatically. As deployment proceeds, this will only amplify and accelerate the dynamic of universal cost reduction. We must expect and plan for a sweeping tide of supply-driven, not demand-driven, deflationary pressure across the entire global economy as a function of the disruption of labor by humanoid robots.
Now, what does this mean? Well, everything is going to get better. All products drastically better. We probably think, "Oh, smartphones, they're amazing today, but they're nothing compared to what they will be." Cars, airplanes, drones, everything will be much, much better than they are now. You can't even imagine how good things are going to be. The quality of virtually all manufactured goods will tend to improve, he says, because the limits of skill and attention to detail that apply to humans do not apply to robots. C. says that manufacturers will have far less incentive to cut corners, sacrifice precision, or fail to ensure the tasks and processes are performed with maximum care and thoughtfulness, because in stark contrast to human workers, there will be little to no cost savings obtainable from humanoid robots. These ways, every humanoid robot will perform every task it is capable of performing at the maximum quality it can perform it, every single time.
As a result of all this, productivity will skyrocket. And this is where my belief of the singularity comes into play. Improvement in technological capability and the accumulation of capital in its various forms, equipment, infrastructure, knowledge, social relationships, have made humanity more and more productive on a per capita basis throughout the ages, and especially since the Industrial Revolution. But labor has always remained a limiting factor of production. And up until now, the quantity of available labor has been a function of population. I mean, look at China, right? 1.3, 1.4 billion people, and their production and manufacturing capacity is enormous. Regions with more and cheaper labor have enjoyed a competitive advantage as a result.
Humanoid robots fundamentally change this equation. Instead of growing only as fast as a human population, available labor can grow as fast as humanoid robots can be built and deployed. The difference is explosive. C. says that like a dam busting, humanoid robots will unleash a torrent of productivity as countless tasks that could hitherto only be performed by the finite supply of adult humans are performed far more cheaply by humanoid robots. This will affect not only all existing applications and industries but also enable entirely new applications and industries which were not previously possible in the old human-based labor system due to the high cost, danger, or other limitations of human workers. And the humanoid robot labor force can expand with little constraint in almost any region or country, negating most of the regional competitive advantage from low-cost labor that we see today.
Could this mean that China's huge manufacturing advantages will be wiped out? I don't know. But China does seem concerned about this. They have said that they are massively investing in their local robotics companies to try to get them to help them, um, spread their robot workers all around the world. They believe this disruption is coming, but they want to be the ones to make it happen. Investing in humanoid robots is now a matter of national interest, says C. This is important. Humanoid robots will allow any nation to massively expand its workforce and thus grow its economy on a productivity per capita basis to a degree that has simply been physically impossible up until now. And I think that this is what Musk truly understands, and is the reason why he is pivoting Tesla away from simply being a car company or a company that produces things into a company that produces, uh, workers that can create anything.
It takes almost 20 years and more than $100,000 to raise a child and prepare them to join the national workforce of a middle-income country. In the wealthier countries, where cost of living is higher, the cost can exceed $300,000, not including postsecondary education at university. Humanoid robots, by contrast, can be added to the workforce as fast as they can be manufactured, and it is unlikely the unit cost will exceed that of an inexpensive car, even at the very start of commercial deployment. This means that by 2035, for example, adding 1 million people to a nation's workforce might cost $100 billion and take 20 years, whereas adding 1 million humanoid robots to its workforce might cost just $10 billion and take a single year.
As a civilization, we should be able to build humanoid robots at least at the rate we build automobiles, in other words, several billion, potentially per year. C. says we therefore have every reason to expect that physical labor by humanoid robots will supplant physical labor by humans just as quickly as the other examples of the disruption X curves that they've illustrated earlier. For planning and investment purposes, the deployment of humanoid robots is akin to investment in infrastructure, whether public or private. Infrastructure serves as an enabling condition for other activity. This includes economic productivity, of course, but also quality of life activity, ranging from comfort and security to travel and leisure. Nations have historically made enormous investments in basic infrastructure, and we ought to expect this for humanoid robots as well. And just as investments in road and electrical infrastructure recursively enable their own further deployment, so too will humanoid robots.
But here's the thing: this could potentially enable small nations that haven't previously been able to compete a huge possible advantage. The greater a nation's productive capacity is, the greater is its ability to remain economically self-sufficient. In the past, this was only realistic for populations with a large resource base. But a large robotic workforce, combined with the disruptions of energy, transportation, and food, even the smaller nations would be able then to become far less dependent upon foreign trade. Whether the option for isolationism would have what benefits or detriments to international relations, he says, remains to be seen.
But there are some interesting challenges to national security today, says C. But the size of a nation's army can only be a subset of its population. In the future, nations and non-state actors will be able to raise humanoid robot armies that are larger and more capable than today's largest armies, regardless of their own population size. Could there be huge wars? World War II? Who knows? Certainly possible. Any humanoid robot capable of working in a productive capacity can also be deployed in a national security capacity, whether in a supporting or frontline role. And unlike human beings, for whom military conscription and training and deployment is difficult and costly on every level, humanoid robots can be replaced literally overnight. This means that for better or worse, any nation with a large robotic workforce is also a nation with a large robotic army. Whether this becomes a requisite condition of national defense for sovereign integrity in the 21st century remains to be seen, but the fact that humanoid robots have clear and unequivocal military implications cannot be ignored.
C. says that, um, there is no time to lose. America is really already behind the eight ball when it comes to electric cars. They've well and truly lost that race, but they cannot afford to lose this one. Humanoid robots are likely to be one of the most profitable physical product categories ever, ever, by virtue of the sheer scale of the production numbers alone, given the size of the global labor market, together with latent demand that this technology will unlock. It is reasonable to expect the number of humanoid robots deployed to exceed 1 billion over the next two decades, and possibly many, many more. But beyond just their direct financial return to investors, the sweeping implications of the inevitable explosion in productivity, material superabundance, and overall prosperity mean that the returns to society at large on investment in humanoid robots are nothing short of staggering.
Governments and other public institutions such as universities, therefore, have a crucial role to play. C. says that as a matter of general principle, governments, universities, and other public interest institutions and organizations should be prepared to dedicate enormous resources to funding and supporting the development and deployment of humanoid robots in their societies as a matter of national interest. This is urgent. This includes finding funding and support for basic R&D, manufacturing infrastructure to support deployment. Rapid development of these capacities will require massive investment in order to procure requisite human expertise, facilities, and raw material and energy inputs, as well as every element in each of their associated supply chains.
Now, C. says that humanity has been in this sort of situation before. Many societies have built roads, plumbing for running water, electricity services, telephone service, and broadband internet service to every home and business. These basic services not only bring prosperity but massively increase productivity as well. Societies must now aim for robots in every home and business, and for exactly the same reasons. A great deal of experimentation and learning will be required to convert investments in human robots into actual real value. Testing zones that resemble factories, hospitals, and even outdoor urban areas where robotics companies can engage in high learning rate, low risk to humans, experimentation are needed urgently, just as test tracks were for autonomous vehicles. Incentive programs of all kinds should be tried to encourage adoption of the technology and experimentation at every level.
C. says that as the capabilities of humanoid robots approach and then exceed those of human workers, the future will belong to these societies that embrace the humanoid robot labor disruption, developing and deploying this technology as rapidly as possible. Now, how does this, how does this disruption of human labor affect other areas? Well, C. says that it will disrupt energy, transportation, and food in paradigm-changing ways. Research shows that disruptions are already underway in energy, transportation, and food, each of which is a foundational sector of the global economy. Adding the disruption of labor by humanoid robots to the mix will be like hosing gasoline on an already roaring inferno. By making all goods and services cheaper, higher quality, and generally expanding productivity at large, humanoid robots will only accelerate the deployment of each of the constituent technologies behind the other three foundational disruptions as well: solar power, wind power, and batteries in the energy sector; electric autonomous vehicles in the transportation sector; and precision fermentation and cellular agriculture in the food sector.
So, what does this mean for human beings? For us? Well, C. says that humanoid robotics will massively increase prosperity and thereby make every major social, economic, geopolitical, and environmental problem much more solvable. This is an optimistic viewpoint, but I agree with you. Industrialized countries are undergoing massive demographic changes. Every retirement party, uh, packs a double whammy, as it means not only one less member of the national workforce but also one person collecting a pension, or one more person, I should say, collecting a pension. Countries are seeing rapidly aging populations, declining labor forces, and in some cases, a falling population. In response, governments are trying to stake baby booms in their own populations and trying to attract skilled immigrants from other countries. Meanwhile, climate change threatens to destabilize communities and regions across the globe by shifting rainfall patterns, inundating coastlines, exacerbating storm and flood risks, and altering the suitability of land for agriculture, among many other impacts. Formidable challenges abound from housing shortages and rising demand to medical services, to water and resource shortages, to civil strife, and even war. Problems, whether natural or human-made, are inevitable, and they're unavoidable. The key to overcoming them is, and always has been, prosperity. Indeed, a useful way to define prosperity itself is as problem-solving capacity.
The disruption of labor, especially in combination with the disruption of energy, transportation, and food, has the potential to vastly expand material abundance worldwide and thus greatly increase prosperity for everyone, everywhere. If the rate of cost capability improvement in humanoid robots continues as it has been, we will enter an era of material superabundance and prosperity over the next 10 to 20 years that has hitherto been all but unimaginable outside of science fiction. But as the technologies of AI and robotics, along with solar panels and self-driving cars and impossible burgers, all move from the realm of science fiction to science fact, so too do their profound implications.
The technology convergence of the humanoid robot labor engine is happening now. Manufacturability is critical, says C. Every element of robotics hardware and software is likely to improve dramatically over the next decade. But one specific aspect of hardware design that deserves special emphasis is manufacturability, says C. Much of the value, as well as competitive advantage, of humanoid robots from the very start will be in the deployment at scale. Even, even if their capability is limited at first, this can be continuously upgraded with over-the-air updates as their AI rapidly improves, which means there is no reason to delay adoption. It is now a high-stakes global race to build and deploy robots as quickly as possible, among not only competitors within any given industry but also between industries and between nations as well.
Now, intriguingly, C. says that the humanoid form factor, in other words, what we look like, will dominate robotics applications for at least the next decade. Although specialization and optimization of robotics, unconstrained by the human form, will eventually make sense, the robots developed and deployed during the first phase of the disruption will take humanoid form. All the existing facilities, equipment, and infrastructure is designed around the human form. That makes the humanoid form a natural choice for a mass-produced robot in the near term. In the early stages, says, says C., of the disruption, the capability of AI driving the robots will still be immature. In order to improve, enormous amounts of training data must therefore be gathered for AI training. The humanoid form is a clear choice for facilitating large-scale data gathering because humans themselves can facilitate the collection of the data. This data could take the form of videos recorded of humans doing tasks, humans operating human robots, humans wearing sensor suites, and so on, all within human-centric environments using human-centric tools. And we saw in Tesla's latest video with their bot, the person, the engineer in the video was showing the robot what to do, and the robot was actually copying the human. So, this is what C. is saying is how it will happen at the start.
C. says that autocatalysis of humanoid robot production will be key to the success of both individual firms and even national economies. The advantages of humanoid robots are so stark at every level of analysis, from individual firms to industries to regions and entire nations, that it is obvious we are now under race conditions to deploy humanoid robots as fast as possible. As discussed above, it is also obvious that rapid deployment requires huge investments in R&D, manufacturing capacity, and infrastructure to support that deployment. What is less obvious is that humanoid robots must be deployed as early as possible into their own manufacturing to accelerate their production and deployment flywheel. We've seen this before. Computer hardware and software has always been used to design better computer hardware and better software. Self-acceleration will thus need to be a crucial part of humanoid robot investment and deployment strategy at every level, from an individual firm's business model to an entire nation's policymaking.
So, how does this affect you and your job, our jobs? Well, it's an interesting one, and C. says this: technological unemployment remains inevitable, but latent demand for labor will be met first, creating a crucial planning window for a soft landing. In other words, he's warning you, it's going to happen. Prepare for it. The demand for labor vastly exceeds the available supply. There are chronic labor shortages across a wide range of industries in many countries, including throughout Europe and the United States. And beyond demand for labor in the form of existing job roles, there is also an enormous quantity of latent demand for labor that goes perpetually unmet because it is too low-paying, too dangerous, or otherwise too undesirable for human workers to supply at all. Moreover, history shows that although capital, in the form of facilities, machinery, and knowledge, have some have substituted and thus displaced labor time and time again, labor has nevertheless evolved to remain complementary to that capital. Counterintuitively, this has put upward pressure on the value of labor over time. This dynamic is sometimes framed as technological empowerment of labor, when new technologies increase worker leverage by expanding their capabilities. For example, construction workers have been literally empowered by power tools, while office workers have been figuratively empowered by computers and other information technology.
Following this historical pattern, there will be a brief period when the same is also true of humanoid robots. In the near term, perhaps a decade or so, humanoid robots will be largely deployed to meet demand for labor that is currently going unmet by humans, as opposed to directly displacing human workers from jobs they currently occupy. This will create a non-obvious and counterintuitive situation in which humanoid robots appear to be almost purely a force multiplier for existing jobs and workers, rather than a threat to them, like we work alongside them, and everything goes nicely. But it won't end that way. While true and worthy of celebration, we must be aware this condition will not persist for long. Even though an individual human's capability will be greatly enhanced if they have a personal team of humanoid robots to command, there will be no benefit to employers of having that human in the loop instead of merely commanding that team of robots directly themselves, possibly using some sort of computer program, especially with executive assistance from increasingly capable artificial intelligence. One person could essentially run an entire billion-dollar company. This means the era of complementarity between labor and capital is coming to a close. Work will soon become something that only machines do. When the disruption of its labor, of labor, is complete, we will need to rethink economics because fundamental notions like scarcity and exogenous total factor productivity will no longer hold. The labor engine itself, a new kind of capital, will become self-sustaining and self-expanding, and superabundance will become the rule rather than the exception. It is almost impossible to overstate how radical this transformation of the human condition will be. It will indeed be liberating to an extent that up until now has seemed almost unimaginable, purely the realm of utopian science fiction. But it also means widespread public concern about technological unemployment from AI and robotics remains entirely valid in the longer term, from perhaps the late 2030s onward.
And this has me thinking, could it be something like the movie Wall-E? You know, the animated film Wall-E, where human beings eventually, um, lose the ability to even really move around because we become kind of like, um, blobs that are just sitting being entertained all the time? Well, for some people, that will happen. C. even says that the destabilization caused by disruption of labor could well be catastrophic, and he says that we must use this fleeting grace period that we have now to prepare for a soft landing, meaning a stable and just transformation across society in response to the disruption of labor.
Demand for labor, he says, is so great and varied that many different firms will thrive simultaneously in the early years of the disruption. Like light bulbs, telephones, computers, and many other disruptive technologies, the demand for humanoid robots will be enormous at the beginning of the disruption when demand still vastly exceeds supply. No single producer will be able to capture all markets. We should therefore expect to see the same pattern that has emerged in previous disruptions: many companies, both startups and incumbents, will rapidly develop humanoid robot offerings for wide-range applications, targeting dozens or hundreds of market niches using a variety of different business models. Even though the leading technology developers in the humanoid robot sector might limit their humanoid robots to deployment in factories or to lease-only user agreements, there will be so much demand for human robots that other firms, building on the leaderboard, will still enjoy huge opportunities to step in and target other markets with other business models as well. For example, if a leading firm decides to only lease its robots for use in factories, one or more other firms will seize the opportunity to sell robots for use at home, even if their robots are somewhat less capable.
Now, C. concludes by saying that in other disruptions throughout history, we have seen incumbent interests turn to their governments for protection against new technologies. These protections can take the form of subsidies and handouts to the old industries, regulations and prohibitions that impede new industries built upon the new technologies, and bailouts when the old industry inevitably collapses. Almost invariably, the benefits of these protections accrue only to the privileged few who own and control the incumbent interests, rather than to the individuals, communities who lose their livelihoods because of the disruption.
Now, this could happen. It could be catastrophic. But to avoid making the same mistakes as C., which could prove catastrophic at the scale of an entire global labor market, we must rethink the relationships between a nation's population and its economic output and get ready to transform society itself. The disruption of labor is inevitable, and together with the disruptions of energy, transportation, and food, it could herald a new age of unprecedented freedom and unprecedented prosperity, but only if we are willing to experiment, to learn, and to transcend the limits of the past, starting right now.
Now, I recommend that you bookmark Tony C.'s website, Rethink X, if you really want to know what's going on in the future. The media is not the place to find your information. Places like Rethink X, who are not interested in sensationalism but interested in facts, can help inform you on the best decisions for you to make. Now, whether that be investing in a certain company, or that be deciding on how you plan out the next 10 years of your life. For me personally, the place that I will be going is Tony C.'s Rethink X. Thank you for watching.