The revolution in digital machine intelligence is now thoroughly underway, but the counterpart of this revolution in the physical world has barely begun. The autonomous taxis that drive in a handful of American cities are among the few concrete examples we have of the transformations that are brewing. Back in the digital world, many of us have seen demonstrations of humanoid robot prototypes doing karate, dancing, folding laundry, or sorting parts in a factory. Perhaps these videos offer us a glimpse into our future, but if they do, it is but one narrow slice. The transformations wrought by the Cambrian explosion of thinking machines that will soon roam the physical world will be more surprising and counter-intuitive than we can imagine.
But therein lies the problem: the ideas for the applications of “robots” with the greatest potential are nascent, and nascent things are fragile. In today’s America, “surprise,” when it happens in the physical world, is often unlawful due to an immense thicket of regulatory and legal guardrails designed to preserve the built status quo. These very same rules are also blockers of American reindustrialization, complicating the construction of the factories where the drones, autonomous vehicles, robotic arms, quadruped robots, and humanoids of the future will be built. This institutional complex therefore imposes the principal objective to both building and diffusing the physical-world technologies of the future. Put more simply, these laws and regulations, unchecked, will hinder us from bringing a brighter, richer future to fruition.
Environmental permitting and land use laws are one important part of this institutional complex, but only one. Just as often, the legal culprits blocking autonomous technologies are to be found in regulations far afield of these more familiar targets of accelerationist ire. Just like environmental permitting and land use, few of these regulations were put in place for no reason. Many exist for fundamentally good reasons, or at least reasons that were at one point fundamentally good. Grappling with this institutional complex, then, will not always be a simple matter of saying “afuera!” Success requires a multi-disciplinary effort that must exercise utmost technocratic and political sensitivity.
Today, the Foundation for American Innovation is pleased to launch just such an effort. The new Physical Intelligence team will sit underneath the existing AI team, but borrow expertise from other FAI policy verticals as well. It will also, of course, bring on expertise of its own, starting with Non-Resident Fellow Amelia Michael and Research Fellow Emerson Alden. As we see it, our scope incorporates several streams:
- Creating a favorable regulatory and legal climate for experimentation with and scaled deployment of autonomous technologies in the physical world.
- Understanding the technical trajectory of robotics and other autonomy technologies, with an eye toward informing policymakers and the broader public about the likely contours of future technological developments.
- Articulating the industrial strategy that will be required to ensure the core technologies of physical autonomy are designed and manufactured in the U.S. or its allies.
- Developing policy frameworks for liability, cybersecurity, and similar areas of the emerging law of robotics.
If you are interested in working in any or multiple of these areas, please get in touch. We are actively seeking talent of all backgrounds, ages, and levels of seniority. It is our belief that the best scholars of this new field will come from a diverse range of backgrounds.
We are articulating this statement of purpose today because we hope to inspire others—entrepreneurs, researchers, policy analysts, policymakers, and interested citizens. We hope you concur with us that the vision we cast is worth pursuing, and that the hurdles we foresee are worth surmounting. Above is the short version of our story; the slightly longer version can be read at Hyperdimensional.
