Video: Rebuilding American Industry with Physical AI
AI-powered robotics could make it economically viable to bring manufacturing back to the United States, potentially fueling a new era of U.S. industrialization.
Physical AI and the Coming Industrial Renaissance
Ankur Crawford: I am really excited about this concept of the U.S. reindustrializing, and having an industrial renaissance. One of the reasons I’m so excited about it is because over the last two decades, manufacturing was effectively exported to lower cost geographies. I think what the market should realize over the next three years is that physical AI is not only autonomous vehicles, it also extends to things like humanoids. And if you look at the economics of a humanoid, by 2030 or the early 2030s, we think one humanoid robot, on an hourly basis, will be a fraction of the cost of a factory worker in the U.S. And we think that is incredibly compelling for rebuilding industry in the U.S.
Intelligence Moves into Machines
Ankur: What makes robotics different now is that the robots are in fact intelligent. Historically you go into a car factory and what is it that you see? You see a large arm basically taking something here and doing this. And this is what it does all day long, exactly this. It cannot change what it’s doing, because it has one job to do and that is the only job it will do. If you walk into an actual car manufacturing facility in which humans are working, sometimes there needs to be adjustments, right? And sometimes, the hole that needs to get made or the hole that exists is not quite big enough or not quite the same alignment, and a robot, like a human, needs to use an intelligence to amend what it’s doing. We think a robot can be used for many different aspects in the factory. Maybe instead of doing the same task over and over again, it can do several tasks. It can deal with variability of output.
And recently, Figure AI showed how robots were actually replacing one another to go charge themselves, so every four hours, one of the robots would come and replace the one that was discharging, and it would go charge itself and then replace the other robot when it was getting discharged. This is just one aspect of robotics and of humanoids. But the idea is that the intelligence layer is then connected to the physical ability to do things.
From the Assembly Line to the Living Room
Ankur: We’re short nurses in nursing homes. Can we deploy humanoids in nursing homes? Can every kind of senior have a caretaker humanoid that looks after them? Can you fathom a time when you actually have a humanoid in your home doing the dishes or doing your laundry or making your bed, or almost like a physical assistant? I know it sounds really Jetsons-esque. But we think that time is coming and it’s coming faster than I think people perceive. And in part because we think that the cost of a humanoid is coming down.
The Workforce Evolves Alongside Humanoids
Ankur: There’s going to be people who need to fix the robots. There are people who still will need to do the backend, or I guess the frontend of tasks. If we’re manufacturing here, a robot is not going to build our factories. But there is an entire supply chain of humans that will be needed as we build out and we provide goods to our society. So I think the jobs that will come are going to be different than the jobs that we imagine today.
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