[kypro]

If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me.

And similar things can be said about many technologies in recent history – cars replacing the horse, first flight to man on the moon, even the creation of early internet to its mass adoption.

You're talking generally a decade or 2 for society to completely change from the rapid advancement of a new technology.

I'm not saying I agree with the 2035 prediction, but it doesn't seem impossible to me, if AI can help us improve the pace that we're already developing disruptive robotics.

In 2010 the idea of self-driving cars and autonomous delivery drones seemed very sci-fi and a long way out. But today, just 15 years on, these things are increasingly starting to be rolled out.

If they dropped that 95% number to 50-60%, I think I'd probably lean towards agreeing. Not because it makes sense in my gut, but because the logical part of my brain knows exponential trends (if one exists) do things that we wouldn't instinctively predict. But even if you assume exponentials 95% does seem very high.

[skybrian]

You say "just" 15 years, but Waymo is still only available in a few cities. That seems more like a slow, cautious rollout to me, not a fast takeoff. Society has had a lot of time to get used to (and tired of) the idea and come up with regulations.

My guess is that the deployment of other types of robots will often be a similarly slow grind.

That's unlike the Internet, smart phones, and coding agents, which got user adoption at a much quicker pace.

[nullandvoid]

Waymo was largely built pre-LLM and AI level funding - I think it might be a somewhat apple and pairs comparison.

[skybrian]

Maybe research and development will speed up a bit, but I think it’s still going to require a lot of expensive experimenting in the real world.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me."

It's 2026, one year after your predicted date, and that still hasn't happened though.

[somebodythere]

The thing about exponentials is if you admit 60%, it's pretty easy to admit 95%.

[kypro]

That's a fair push back.

For a specific technology to become viable, you often need progress in several individual technologies to occur. Some of these will be exponential and surprise us, but many will see slower progress.

Either way, I suspect progress in robotics will be slower than AI, but I also think we'll see a lot of investment in robotics over the next decade given that AI opens up a lot of new potential applications for robotics.

I suspect any task that doesn't require extreme battery life or extreme dexterity will be doable by robots much sooner than most people think today. I think we could have decent-ish humanoid robots within a decade – robots that can prepare food, clean hotel rooms, empty bins, etc. I think Elon's bet on Optimus is quite likely to be viewed as very ahead of the curve with time.

However, it will take much longer for robots to do everything a human body can, but then most jobs don't require we push the physical limits of human body.

That's why I think 60% is reasonable. And even then I'm not saying it will happen, I just don't think that's a bad bet if given even odds.

[skybrian]

Depends on what kind of curve it is. 60% reliable is useless in most safety-related fields and getting to near-perfect reliability is tough.