Your Grandparents' Caregiver Could Be a Robot
Plus, the Department of War's Understanding that Everything Can Equal Nothing
đ¨ Last week, we had Natural Resources Chairman Chairman Bruce Westerman share a piece on the work his committee is doing on permitting reform.
The primary bill in that effort, the SPEED Act, is scheduled for a committee markup on Thursday. We will keep you posted as it continues to work its way through Congress.
A True Home Case For The Humanoid?
This weekend, an op-ed in the the Wall Street Journal brought a scenario to surface that we hadnât thought much about: home robots serving the elderly or aging.
Several weeks ago the company 1X revealed the first iteration of their home robot, Neo. And the timeline did what it does best: accentuating the absurd in hilarious fashion with memes galore. Watching a robot do the things you could do yourself but only much slower and with the finesse of a 6 year old was low hanging fruit.
Humor wasnât the only reaction though. A Pirate Wires piece titled âDonât Let Robots Do Your Choresâ acknowledged that home remedial tasks may be a nuisance, but they have meaning. And âautomating the home out of your houseâ probably doesnât help the increasing distance emerging between humans and the intricacies of life.
But the author of the Journal op-ed reminds us that the young and fully able-bodied humans arenât the only ones in a home. America is getting older. And caring for this aging population is facing a crisis.
Care (either in the home or at an assisted living facility) is expensive and losing its workforce. Families often struggle to make the right decision for a loved one that is having a hard time living on their own.
A humanoid like Neo could allow this generation to âage in placeâ longer, which surveys suggest is the preference of many. It can help them get out of bed, take a shower, and grab things that might otherwise cause them to lose their balance and fall. It also would encourage younger generations to chip in, such as a neighbor stopping by in the afternoon without the worry of having to do too much.
The idea of handing an aging loved one off to a robot might feel even more inhumane than moving them to âa homeâ where they are at least with their peers. But maintaining their independence and presence in the community is a benefit to society that we are currently losing, for both the younger and older generations.
Fewer Targets, Better Aim
Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, Emil Michael just did what DC can rarely manage: admitting that trying to do everything means accomplishing nothing. And then actually narrowing the focus of the critical technologies sought by the Department of War.
Cutting the Pentagonâs critical tech priorities from 14 to 6 is neither a branding exercise nor administrative housekeeping; â14 priorities means no priorities at allâ is the kind of obvious truth that usually gets buried under consensus and approval seeking from a laundry list of stakeholders.
The new list still has the big stuff: AI, biomanufacturing, contested logistics, quantum/battlefield info dominance, directed energy, and hypersonics. Perhaps the most important focus though is the willingness to say ânot nowâ to potentially worthy projects that dilute effort and emphasis and focus on the things that matter more.
The real test isnât whether these six areas turn out to be the right six. It will be whether the Pentagon can resist the inevitable pressure to add number seven, then eight, then creep back to fourteen. Every excluded constituency will make a case for why their technology is also critical. Theyâll probably be correct.
But prioritization isnât about picking good things over bad things. Itâs about picking some good things over other good things when resources, budgetary and time and attention, are scarce. Michaelâs bet is that âfocused sprintsâ delivering results now beats comprehensive coverage delivering results never. Weâll see if This Townâs antibodies reject this foreign concept.
Another $6 Billion AI Lab Launches, and âWorld Modelsâ are all the rage
Jeff Bezos is back in an operational role as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, an AI startup focused on engineering and manufacturing for computers, aerospace, and automobiles. The company raised $6.2 billion and has already poached nearly 100 researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta.
The notable angle: Prometheus is apparently building AI that learns from the physical world, not text. The plan reportedly includes running enormous numbers of real-world experiments with robots, potentially to train systems that can autonomously aid in scientific discovery.
Bezosâ co-CEO Vik Bajaj has experience at Google XââThe Moonshot Factoryââand helped launch Waymo. The capital flooding into physical autonomy tells us something: the next competitive frontier is AI that can manipulate matter, do physical work, and even run experiments to help accelerate discoveries.