A central challenge with autonomy is that the low- and medium-hanging fruit has already been plucked—sometimes long ago. Agriculture, mining, commercial aviation, and much of manufacturing are already heavily automated industries. Can one automate the truck that transports raw ore from a mine pit to a processing facility? Yes, and many have. But the wage of the human truck driver pales in comparison to the fuel required to get a 400 ton, fully-burdened truck from the bottom of the mine to the top, along with the maintenance of the truck’s engine, tires, and the like.
Thus, end-to-end automation of open-pit mines may not yield the dramatic reductions in price or improvements in productivity one might expect from “end-to-end autonomy.” Similar dynamics apply in numerous other industries. The characteristic that unites these industries is that human labor is not the binding constraint on transforming the underlying economics (incidentally, very often, the binding constraint in these domains is instead energy cost or some direct derivative thereof; FAI also supports the radical abundance of energy for this reason). While we applaud such efforts at automation, these are unlikely to be the applications of physical-world AI that yield epochal benefits for the American people.
