The Uber-famous founder, Travis Kalanick, says a new golden age is coming — and it’s robots that are ushering it in.
Kalanick announced a new venture called Atoms on Friday in a 1,600-word screed in which he said the automation of the physical world is the next phase of the AI era.
“Software has automated tasks of language and math, but the complete automation of the physical world — autonomy — remains largely untouched territory, the principal unlock to the next era of progress and abundance,” he wrote. “History refers to this kind of moment of radical progress as a Golden Age.”
Kalanick said this “golden age” is emerging as production and transportation become driven primarily by computation, minerals, and energy. With autonomous machines building other machines and software constantly improving itself, he said, productivity could reach unprecedented levels.
“The organization of human capital becomes superhuman,” he wrote.
Kalanick later said on the tech talk show TBPN on Friday that Atoms has been operating in stealth mode for the past eight years. Now, the company aims to expand its delivery infrastructure beyond food into industries such as food service, mining, and transportation.
He said in his announcement that the company’s goal is to create “gainfully employed robots.” He defines these as “specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large.”
He also said humans should be careful about building robots in their own image. “I watched the half-marathon and couldn’t help but think how much better it would be if they just had wheels,” he wrote, referring to a competition in Beijing last year that pitted humanoid robots against each other.
Kalanick cofounded Uber in 2009. He led the company as CEO until 2017, when he stepped down amid reports of a toxic workplace culture and ongoing regulatory battles.
He isn’t the only tech executive who believes AI robots should extend beyond humanoid form.
The cofounder and CEO of World Labs, Fei-Fei Li, said on the No Priors podcast last year that building physical AI in a singular form is energy inefficient.
“Just an extreme and trivial example, if we put robots underwater, they should not be the shape of humans,” she said. “They better be in the shape of fish. Just think about energy efficiency. The same with flying.”
