Welcome to my inaugural Substack post!
This platform is dedicated to a simple proposition: that the future, for all its uncertainty, is likely to be better than the present.
Having worked in emerging technology policy for more than a decade, my observation is that assertion has consistently bourne out to be true. Despite how far we have come within a single generation, however, I think some of the greatest opportunities for technology-driven socio-economic betterment are still ahead of us. The current cultural zeitgeist suggests AI will be driving us towards that brighter future. That may be true, but only to a point.
For all the commentary on the current and future value proposition of AI, I actually think the realm of physically “embodied AI” — that is, robotics — is where the proverbial rubber will meet the road in showcasing the economic gains from applied AI solutions. Hence, the name of this newsletter: Positronic Policy.
Many years ago, I wrote a piece about the
moments in history that redefine the human experience. Old ways of thinking are upended, the traditions of yesteryear are turned on their heads, and radical new ideas are not just entertained by a select few, but embraced by the masses. These are periods when societies pivot away from the familiar and comfortable and welcome the future. The famed philosopher and sociologist Karl Jaspers described these periods as Axial Ages.
At the time, I was writing about the prospect of a more general “Technological Axial Age” that would reshape the foundations of modern society. Over the past year or so, however, I’ve started believing that this pivot point is more likely to be catalyzed by advanced robotics, not only in industrial manufacturing but across all sectors of economic and social life. This, in turn, is likely to animate a sweeping reexamination of … well, everything. From the physical and spiritual institutions that form the bedrock of modern society to the moral and philosophical frameworks that define what it is to be human, this Axial Age of Robotics will herald profound changes in the future trajectory of human civilization. And I find that to be an exciting prospect!
This is a coming revolution that few people are talking about — least of all in DC policy circles, where I spend much of my time. I’ve become increasingly interested in this space, so I wanted to use this platform as an opportunity to highlight the beneficial impacts of this technology and provide my thoughts on what policies will help accelerate America’s development and adoption of this technology.
My goal throughout these first few posts will be to detail a set of general principles for why robotics matter, what areas of life this field will inevitably impact, and how our society — and each of us individually — will need to adjust to accommodate those changes. Drawing from these commentaries, my aim is to first assemble something approaching a general treatise on the value proposition of robotics. That will be followed by a regular cadence of thoughts and recommendations on effective policies to promote the benefits, while mitigating the costs, of this technology’s integration into American life.
The potential policy implications of robotics are vast. I’ll be exploring a lot of those particulars in more detail a bit further down the line, but for now, here’s a quick list of some of the issues that have immediately grabbed my attention.
We don’t have enough training data. Just as generative AI systems need large pretraining data sets to learn, embodied AI needs a similarly significant set of real-world data. Unfortunately, where LLM developers have access to essentially the corpus of human knowledge via Internet crawling, robotics manufacturers don’t have an “Internet of real world manufacturing environments” from which to draw. Collecting data from physical interactions is a much more difficult, and expensive, challenge than simply sending an automated algorithm to scrape the online world, and is currently a major limitation in accelerating advancements in this space — especially for smaller startups. Data policy in robotics is, I think, one of the key policy arenas that can benefit from more creative thinking. (One idea I’m interested in toying with a bit here is some type of data escrow holding company — possibly in the form of a public-private partnership — that incentivizes both large and small players to contribute their unique datasets so as to minimize the data fragmentation that currently plagues the industry. That, or some sort of NAIRR-style shared edge computing infrastructure. Government could potentially create positive incentives for sharing data by kicking in publicly-available data from real-world environments and conditioning access to those data sets on participation in this consortium. This is just an early germination of an idea, but one I’ll be exploring in a future piece.)
America doesn’t make enough robots. Believe it or not, but over the past half century, the United States has largely ceded the lead in robotics manufacturing to other countries — both allies, like South Korea and Japan, and geopolitical rivals (see: China). That, to me, is a bit crazy. There’s no reason America shouldn’t be at the forefront of this innovation ecosystem, the same as AI. I don’t have an easy solution to the many vectors that have likely impacted this decades-long trend, but an easy starting place is probably the need for some type of national robotics strategy. That will only take us so far, of course, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And that seems like a pretty easy first step.
Who’s at fault when the robots go awry? This is the classic product liability question. Maybe existing liability laws are sufficient; maybe some new framework is needed. Certainly, as robots become increasingly autonomous actors in society, there will be different rules for different applications (e.g., an industrial robot zipping along a factory floor is a helluva lot different than an autonomous vehicle driving down a public highway). But a fundamental question with any new technology is who bears the cost when things don’t go as expected, and as more robots start diffusing across hitherto untouched areas of daily life I expect that question will be at the forefront of a lot of policy conversations.
The robots are going to take the jobs. We (should) all want the productivity gains from robotics, but how do we manage labour displacement and the nature of work in an increasingly automated society? There’s no shortage of commentary about how the current generation of generative AI systems could portend a culling of white collar jobs, but that technology isn’t going to replace your plumber or electrician. But what happens when an embodied AI can? We’re probably a ways away from that scenario, but it’s worth exploring in a future piece.
And these policy issues barely scratch the surface of the many, many questions presented by an Axial Age of robotics.
Next Up …
But before jumping into those policy conversations, I want to ruminate a bit on the nature of art and creativity in an age of generative AI. This ties directly into the job displacement question, though in a more philosophical light, and how AI does not, contrary to many hot takes, portend the end of storytelling and the artistic endeavour, and my own personal take on what I call the “Studio Ghibli Hypothesis.”
Stay tuned!