The world at ten billion robots
I’ve been trying to picture the day the AI models start improving themselves faster than we can follow, and I can’t, because there won’t be one. Sometime in the next six months to three years, a frontier lab will announce that its models did most of the research on their own successor. The models will increasingly write the experiments, run them, study the failures, and hand the researchers a better model to start over with. Most people won’t notice. By then the models will already handle enough of their email that the news won’t feel strange.
This isn’t my base case. It isn’t even the bull case. It’s the most aggressive future I think is still plausible enough to take seriously. Ten billion robots is Elon Musk’s number, from a conference in Riyadh in October 2024, and the published forecasts are far lower. I’m using it anyway, because ten billion is more useful as a thought experiment than as a forecast. The question underneath it is what happens when useful labor stops being scarce.
You’ll see the change in prices long before you see it in headlines. The intelligence underneath a $200 software seat falls to $2. I checked my own bill after writing that sentence. We aren’t there yet. A diagnosis that used to need a specialist comes through a phone. A contract review that took an associate a week takes a single call. That kind of deflation is good for almost everyone as a buyer and destabilizing for many of the same people as workers. Our politics has no vocabulary for abundance that lowers prices while eroding incomes, so we’ll misread it for a decade.
Here’s the idea I keep coming back to. For most of economic history, labor and intelligence arrived together inside a person, along with the judgment about how to use them. AI separates intelligence from the person. Robotics separates labor. Judgment may be the last part of the bundle that stays scarce.
Robots are the part people can see, so that’s when the change becomes obvious. I should say plainly that the robot numbers are the part of this I trust least. I’m sure about the direction and much less sure about the dates.
The aggressive case is a billion humanoid robots by 2036 and ten billion by 2040, with dexterity that matches ours. Most published forecasts are far below that, and the humanoids shipping today still struggle with basic manipulation and with working without a person nearby. But at human productivity, a billion robots working two shifts would supply the labor of two billion full-time workers. About 3.5 billion people are employed worldwide. The first wave goes where it’s already going, into factories and warehouses. The second walks onto job sites, into hospitals and eventually into homes. The year a home robot costs less than a used car is the year the labor market breaks in public. I’d put that price around $15,000, and I think it happens before 2036.
The math isn’t complicated. Assume, aggressively, that one machine can do one worker’s full job. A framer or a nursing aide can easily cost an employer $50,000 to $70,000 a year once you add benefits and taxes. Put a $15,000 robot on a single shift. Even with another $15,000 a year for software, maintenance, insurance and power, the numbers turn brutal within the first year, and the robot never has to be better than the person. Framers and nursing aides were supposed to have the safe jobs, the ones that need hands and involve patients. They aren’t safe. They’re further down the line, and the line got shorter.
Two things slow that down. Robots need someone to blame when they drop a patient, and that’s a legal problem before it’s an engineering problem. And the headcount doesn’t go to zero, because a human supervisor stays valuable as the person who can be held accountable. There will be far fewer of them, though.
I think unemployment stays deceptively low for a while as people take worse jobs, then hours fall, then whole categories disappear at once. Law firms are a good preview. The billable hour will still exist at the end of that sequence. The pyramid underneath it won’t, because the associate work that paid for partner draws is now a model call.
Once execution is nearly free, the economy splits in two. One is an abundance economy for anything made of atoms plus intelligence. Housing gets cheap when robot crews frame it. Food gets cheap when nobody has to visit the farm. Medicine and energy follow the same curve, and you’ll be able to watch it happen. There’s a catch, and lawyers will spot it first. Cheap labor doesn’t repeal zoning, permitting, liability, licensing, grid queues or land scarcity. A robot crew can frame a house in a day while the city takes eighteen months to approve it. Intelligence can become abundant faster than institutions can adapt, and for a while the bottleneck moves from the job site to the permit office. How long does that last? I don’t know. In California it could be five years.
The other is a scarcity economy for what can’t be manufactured. Land where people want to live stays expensive. So does attention, and so does trust, and so does a seat at the table. Somebody captures the gap between the $200 seat and the $2 of intelligence under it. The wealth gathers around whoever owns the compute and the robot fleets, and every country ends up facing the same choice. Tax the machines and distribute the proceeds, or let ownership decide who gets what.
The strongest objection comes from economists, and it deserves its full weight because history has favored it. The loom, the tractor, the ATM and the spreadsheet displaced enormous amounts of labor, yet economies kept creating new jobs. Lower costs created new demand and new industries, and comparative advantage left people something useful to do even when machines did many tasks better.
Comparative advantage says some task remains for the human. It doesn’t guarantee enough demand for that task, or a wage high enough to live on. At ten billion machines, comparative advantage can survive mathematically while human bargaining power collapses economically. When the better worker can be copied for the price of a used car, whatever work is left for people carries far less bargaining power than it does today. People will still do things. Wages just stop being how most of them get money, and in the rich democracies I’d put that before 2040. My guess is that most of them land on some form of universal dividend, and that they get there through crisis rather than planning. A few countries build their own compute early and become the new petrostates.
Education is where I’m most hopeful and most worried at the same time. In this version of the future, every kid gets a tutor better than any who ever lived, one that’s patient forever and knows how that one mind works. The first evidence is already here. In the fall of 2023, Harvard ran a randomized trial in a large introductory physics course. Across two lessons, students using a purpose-built AI tutor showed roughly twice the learning gains of students who got the same material in class, and they did it in less time. That’s 194 students, two lessons, one school, and a tutor the professor built by hand. Even so, reading and math gaps that have persisted for generations could close for the first cohort of kids who grow up with a tutor like that.
The worry is about purpose. School existed partly to sort people for jobs. Take the jobs away and nobody agrees on what school is for. My guess is that it drifts toward what education was for aristocrats. You learn to reason, judge, make things and live with other people, because getting hired stops being the point. Universities lose their monopoly on credentials and have to justify themselves as places where people gather. Some of them will manage it.
The psychological shock lands here too, and I think it’s bigger than the economic one. Since we started farming, we've tied a person's worth to their work. Pull that out and a lot of people won’t know who they are. I’m not sure I’d handle it well myself after twenty-five years in executive roles. Some of that disruption will show up in addiction, loneliness, family formation and politics. The people who already knew how to live without a boss, the painters and the people who raise kids well, will turn out to have been ahead of everyone.
But the opposite happens too. People raise their own kids, coach the team, build things nobody asked for, sit with their parents, start a band at 50. Work may have been occupying territory that people fill faster than we expect once they get it back.
There’s one more part of this I’m still working out. When the smartest entity in the room is never a human, the scarce human skill becomes judgment. Taste is part of it, deciding what’s worth wanting. So is the willingness to answer for a choice. When the machines can do almost anything you specify, the whole game becomes specification, and specification is a moral skill. I suspect we’ll find out that most of what we called intelligence was labor, and what’s left once labor is free looks a lot like character.
The good version of everything above assumes the gains reach most people. They might not. If the compute stays in a few hands and government stays weak, you get a small number of owners with everyone else as their customer. Broad ownership, or a universal dividend backed by real oversight, would give us the closest thing to a golden age we’ve had. Both are possible by 2040, and the technology doesn’t choose between them. Ownership does. The number to watch is how the gains from cheap intelligence split between the people who own it and everyone else. We publish broad measures of labor’s share and income distribution, but nobody can isolate that number for AI yet. I’d want it more than any robot forecast.
Nobody reading this owns a robot fleet, so let me say what I’d tell a friend. Don’t own only your labor. If this scenario is even partly right, the balance between wages and capital tips hard toward capital, and you want some claim on the economy for when wages become a smaller one. A retirement account, a business, a piece of property, whatever your circumstances allow. Get good at the part that doesn’t get manufactured, which is judgment, and being the person who signs and answers for the result. Use the models every day on your own work so you’re the one directing them. And learn to live without a boss before you have to. Find the thing you’d do if nobody paid you and start doing it now, with other people. The meaning crisis will hit hardest the people who waited.
Own something and get good at judgment. Build a life that doesn’t need an employer to give it meaning. The technology doesn’t decide how this turns out. We do, and we’re behind.
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The heat wave appears to be mostly over here in Los Angeles (thankfully!). Here’s Magnus cooling off on the travertine after a morning walk.
