You can tell we're on the cusp when level 5 self driving cars are common an you have multiple companies deploying them on the street. Google is doing great work but the poured TONS of effort into it and the thing still needs intense stacks of perception and processing. Much more than I've seen any humanoids pour into it.
L5 SDV's are much easier to get than humanoids and the have tangible economic benefit. My thesis is that those will come first.
This doesn't really argue against your point, because the standards are what they are, and like I said, I have no idea how one would go about changing them if one even decided they wanted to. And given what they are, it has taken, as you point out, enormous amounts of effort to reach those standards in a practical way.
That all being said, while I agree that SDV's are in many respects easier than other robotics tasks, they are also somewhat uniquely dangerous. Other categories of task, while potentially more complicated, won't have to worry nearly so much about safety, and so may be operating under a different constraint regime. I think this means that we may see adoption happen at a much more accelerated rate than we have seen in the automotive space.
So far, they are not.
I haven't seen good stats on Tesla (they are less transparent than Waymo), but it would shock me if they weren't also at least slightly safer than the average human driver. Human drivers are really bad at driving.
But even if Tesla isn't safer, taken as a whole, the self driving industry as it currently exists still probably is, purely because it's mostly Waymo, and Waymo is dramatically safer.
I think humans will eventually fall out of practice of driving when they use SDVs for most travel. And then every once in a while they'll take their ol' 2026 classic car from highschool out for a spin and find they have forgotten how to drive!
"Moving atoms" can refer to anything that a) touches the physical world, b) has 'eyes' (camera/microphone/Lidar/IR/UV/whatever) and c) requires some brains.
Dark factories exist. This will expand into other areas like logistics, farming, food delivery, maintenance/cleaning jobs, household equipment, etc etc. Over time, blue collar jobs face the same fate.
A lot of this will be powered by AI systems running locally on commodity hardware.
And this is where China is leading: They've got the factories. They build the robots. They make the ICs with integrated video capture & AI features. They fabricate the circuit boards those ICs go on. And they lead in the small/local AI models to run those.
To compete, US would need to re-shore manufacturing which takes decades. Same for EU countries (which have great potential imho if they weren't so slooooww to act & would focus on doing vs. regulate).
Never mind that the billions poured into AI by US companies, are targetting white collar/creative jobs, with the AI part as a cloud service. Or military applications. Not (so much) the manufacturing / logistics etc side of things.
If free cheap energy is unlocked today I reckon it would still take a good 30 years for that to ripple through properly.
It solves lots of problems (water!) but doesn't make the heavy machinery to consume it instantly appear.
Why would an American company outsource manufacturing to China if the labor cost is the same in both places? The entire reason the Chinese manufacturing base exists is to exploit cheap labor.
What would be the point of shipping products across the ocean?
And, if you need changes, you can go talk to them the same day you see a problem.