The Vision
for Atoms

I left Uber in 2017 heartbroken. I had been torn away from an idea and a movement that I had poured my life into. I had lost my bearings as I found the world increasingly operating by the rules of perception not reality.

It was only days after the death of my mother and the near death of my father in a boating accident when an investor decided to come out from the shadows and exploit this vulnerable moment to wrestle control of this idea away.

I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my calling. Back to building.

Digitizing the Physical World is my life's work. After Uber I started building City Storage Systems. The obscure name was a nod to Atoms-based computation with a focus on Real Estate. Our first computer was a Food computer — digitized manufacturing, real estate and logistics for food.

Today we expand our physical world computation portfolio to the Mining and Transport industries and rename the company Atoms.

Physical automation to transform industry and move the world

At Atoms we make gainfully employed robots — specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large.

Valuable Unknown Truths

In the battle against entropy, humans optimize for finding valuable unknown truths. Because when you are good at discovering valuable unknown truths, you know things others don't know. And when you are good at knowing things others don't, you can do things that others can't.

An organization of valuable unknown truth seeking is able to do more and more things that others can't do. That organization will find that it can bring change and progress at accelerating speeds, faster and faster as its knowledge advantage grows.

That change is God's work — human progress in service to the battle against entropy, dust, and death. Civilization.

Past is Prologue

Human history is the recording of this fight and the advance of civilization. From basic tools for survival to levered machinery that humans operate as industry emerged.

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. History refers to this kind of moment of radical progress as a Golden Age.

Everything in our world, in our cities, in our civilization — look around you — is mined or grown — manufactured and moved.

The next Golden Age will be upon us when the means of growing, mining, manufacturing and moving physical things becomes fully divorced from human labor.

Why a Golden Age?

Because when the means to make and move is reduced to computation, minerals and energy alone, when the machines that make machines that make things are also autonomous, the organization of human capital becomes superhuman.

When Tesla has a "lights out" manufacturing plant and the raw materials are brought in by autonomous Tesla freight vehicles, and the manufactured cars then autonomously travel to their new owners' homes… what will that cost? It will simply be the cost of the raw materials and the energy to produce the final product.

And what about when Amazon warehouses are autonomous, and supplied by autonomous manufacturers of the goods they sell, and the goods delivered by autonomous delivery vehicles to your home?

The Inevitable Destination

The Golden Age is close at hand but the journey ahead still has its challenges. Physical world autonomy requires AI for the physical world — computation we haven't invented, at an efficiency we can't yet fathom.

But Moore's law (squared) is our friend. The cost per unit of intelligence is going down in price by 90% per year. Total capabilities and general intelligence have increased nearly 1000-fold over the last 3 years. Hardware, software and manufacturing productivity will continue to compound each other to ever increasing speeds of progress.

Though we're less than one millionth of the way there, the inevitable destination is the singularity — superhuman intelligence and efficiency. Until then, Abundance will be creating more jobs, not less.

Digitizing the Physical World

Once you have the materials and energy for the manufacturing of "progress machines", what kinds of machines are they and what do these machines do? The imperative is movement and action in the physical world with a software-like perspective on physical automation — think of it as treating atoms like bits.

It means approaching physical world problems like software problems — building atoms-based computers. The core computing resources: CPU, Storage, Network for the physical world — digitized manufacturing, real estate and transport.

I'll use an old Uber analogy. In any given city, Uber has tens of thousands of sensors on the road. Because of how they move, Uber should know the real-time state of every traffic light in the city. When you request a ride, Uber can dispatch to any nearby vehicle — but it should be able to predict which vehicle is likely to get stuck behind a trash truck. The car gets to you faster, and Uber became a mini-time-machine because it effectively digitized the physical world.

The Physical AI Tech Stack

The tech stack for industrial progress machines is not for the faint of heart. It requires a polymath organization spanning many domains from sensors and compute to manufacturing, chemistry and real estate. No single company has to do it all, but the more cross-stack competence, the more likely that company can earn its keep.

Gainfully Employed Robots

The critical early decision in Physical AI: should you make generalized robots or specialized ones? To humanoid or not to humanoid, that is the question.

A robotic housekeeper needs to vacuum, dust, fold clothes, wash dishes — a huge diversity of low volume tasks. This is a humanoid's job.

But what if you had an industrial kitchen and needed to make 1000 pancakes an hour? I couldn't think of a worse approach than a humanoid. A specialized machine — precision cooking, ultra-speed and throughput, efficient use of space designed for the machine. This is where specialized robotics shine.

Builders need to be careful of the human fascination with seeing mechanized versions of us. Gainfully employed robots are the machines best suited for the job at hand, that can make a living doing it.

"I'm Back."

I often get the question from entrepreneurs or executives, "What should I do next?"

My answer has always been "become deeply self aware and when the right thing comes, you will know it. If you know yourself, your next thing, your new idea, your work soulmate will reveal itself."

When I told my friends, family and colleagues about my plans for what was next, they were really excited that I was "coming back."

The thing is, I never left.