The world of robotics exploded this past week - and no, I'm not exaggerating. Unitree released a $650,000 walking mech robot with a pilot cabin. Figure AI is pitting their humanoid robots against human tasks - for 81 hours straight. Some person on X/Twitter even gave their Claude access to sensors so it can feel itself. It even sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to itself.
Figure AI humanoid (right) versus human (left)
An X user (link above) hooking their Claude up to sensors
Robotics and sensors are genuinely where all this AI investment starts to make dramatic sense. The real world is very dynamic and finicky - nothing is ever represented cleanly entirely through pre-programmed software. You need dynamic systems capable of interpreting and understanding inputs constantly.
This has a lot of implications for disrupting everything from labor, to logistics, to everyday jobs - one of the roles of a phlebotomist, for example, is to draw blood samples in a clinical setting. If a humanoid bot is capable of doing subsurface skin scanning with sensors attached to its fingers (better than human eyes) to identify draw targets, where does that leave the imprecise squishy human? Apply this thought for every industry.
UBI will be an incredibly strong possibility; the notion of every person's actions being tied to some kind of economic output is a notion most supported in systems of labor and intelligence scarcity, but with hardware and software being printed en-masse, we're rapidly approaching a future where entire sectors of workers will begin to evaporate and re-skill at unprecedented speed.
Because that speed will be dramatically quicker than what individual sectors are capable of adapting to, the central nervous system of a country (the government) will see little other choice than to quell mass unrest and resource consolidation via UBI.
This will likely force a sort of transition where, as an example, companies larger than XYZ billion in revenue must reserve a certain amount of stock to be purchased by their country of incorporation - recycling it back into a sovereign wealth fund that dispenses gains to citizens.
There's an interesting supply-side consideration I want to bring up, which I think supports this transition. Sure, UBI is great in principle, but it does not solve the notion of supply/demand that strives to take advantage of it (e.g. if everyone gets an extra $1000/month, rent and private provider prices raise accordingly).
In ancient Roman times, there was a concept known as a genius loci, or translated: the guardian spirit of a place. I argue it is only a matter of time until every building and place has its own brain, its own ability to understand itself, to communicate its status to others of its kind.
Think: what happens when every possible facet of infrastructure is measured? Example: you may have unaffordable housing in many places - buildings that stand at 80% empty because of excessive private pricing. What if buildings themselves could coordinate their resources among each other in a transparent manner, in a display of calculated, efficient machine economics?
This could be a sort of program where every construction has a brain, an intelligence of sorts, that not only helps the owners inside their own space, but is able to report to the municipality anonymously, regulating prices with regards to occupancy, traffic, and public metrics such that it does not take advantage of that UBI benefit.
I'll be experimenting with my own genius loci in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
Be well,
Michael Kirsanov