The Next Wave of AI Will Be Physical
The ouroboros of software, and the world beyond it.
AI has been the thing everyone has talked about for the last couple of years. This might create the impression that it has touched every corner of the globe and every part of the economy. But that would be false.
The people who talk about AI are mostly those building it or building things around it, rather than the people actively using it in applications outside of software, especially AI software. Adoption in other fields has been slow and difficult.
This is partly because of how quickly AI changes and how hard it is to keep up with those changes when that is not what you do for a living.
The silent majority of people who know about AI but do not actively use it in their businesses or daily lives seem to be the next obvious target for the artificial intelligence machine. And they should be.
In my opinion, AI in software has become a kind of Ouroboros. The people who use it are often the same people who build it. This is not a bad thing, but eventually, builders should move further and begin looking at other things to create, possibly physical ones.
The virtual world was where AI was introduced to the masses and where it was tested. It was a much safer place to experiment than the physical world. But it was never AI’s final destination. It was only a means to the eventual end of moving intelligence into the real world.
We have already seen this beginning to happen through technologies such as self-driving cars. But the models that could make physical AI widely accessible to a broader range of builders have not yet reached the necessary level of abstraction or sophistication to provide an immediate foundation for building.
Once that foundational model exists, there will be a Cambrian explosion of physical-intelligence applications that no one can imagine today, just as there were millions of applications for virtual intelligence that no one could have predicted beforehand.
Physical AI will transform the world and, hopefully, every part of space that humans can reach.
I want to be part of it, and hopefully you do too.