Robots Should Do Everything
Andy Smith
My entrepreneurial hypothesis for the coming year:
Robots should do everything.
Absolutely everything. I should only monitor how they do it and adjust when necessary.
I should build systems of robots.
My task comes down to creating and maintaining infrastructure so that robots can do their work.
Here we should consider the following aspects:
- Entrepreneurial: what exactly should agents do and why
- Technical: servers, hosting, secure communications
- Managerial: which agents will interact and how exactly
- Legal: how to prevent regulatory violations (which may happen by mistake), how to pay taxes on what agents earn
For example, I used to write code for a client’s needs. Now I’m building a team of robots that write code for a client’s needs. My responsibility is to build the system so that the quality of the result is acceptable.
And then there are options:
- Use the resulting system to earn money on other client tasks (or other clients). In this case, I’m selling my responsibility for the result.
- Sell or provide access to the developed system so that clients can do the work themselves. In this case, I’m selling system maintenance, and the responsibility is on the client’s side (they will understand that they’re dealing with a robot system and must accept the risks).
- Build new systems, or even meta-systems that allow building new robot systems.
There can also be some combination of these options. For example, I build a meta-system that builds and maintains systems, some of which I sell, and some I use to maintain the system and meta-system itself.
This way we get a new class of systems that can build upon themselves. That’s where development should head.