If you don't care about getting the drone back, it does simplify the problem somewhat.
The theme of the scientific findings is that while humans excel with none of our physical sensors, we do very well across the board in making use of them thanks to our relatively huge brains.
And fantastical amounts of compute power is exactly what are handing over to AI. The fact that their training data isn't perfect may matter less.
But during peacetime, you don't make money running a delivery service that way, so it's not going to replace those jobs.
Maybe they will soon but it’s massively far behind the kind of timeframe AI 2027 would have implied.
But, if you could wave a wand and eliminate all legal and liability hurdles to self-driving, automobile deaths would plummet. They're way safer than the average human driver. The technology is definitely capable, our society just isn't ready for it.
This past 4th of July weekend a Waymo ran over an actively burning firework in a low speed scenario, the kind of thing a 95 year old driver would have avoided.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/waymo-car-travels...
250 years of constant automation has never produced large scale unemployment, despite obsoleting everyone's jobs several times over.
“I’ve been pulling my sled across this lake for 50 winters even when the temperature went above freezing. Never fell through!”
In the industrialized world, old professions disappear all the time, and are replaced with new ones. I saw somewhere that it's about 2% per year.
And similar things can be said about many technologies in recent history – cars replacing the horse, first flight to man on the moon, even the creation of early internet to its mass adoption.
You're talking generally a decade or 2 for society to completely change from the rapid advancement of a new technology.
I'm not saying I agree with the 2035 prediction, but it doesn't seem impossible to me, if AI can help us improve the pace that we're already developing disruptive robotics.
In 2010 the idea of self-driving cars and autonomous delivery drones seemed very sci-fi and a long way out. But today, just 15 years on, these things are increasingly starting to be rolled out.
If they dropped that 95% number to 50-60%, I think I'd probably lean towards agreeing. Not because it makes sense in my gut, but because the logical part of my brain knows exponential trends (if one exists) do things that we wouldn't instinctively predict. But even if you assume exponentials 95% does seem very high.
For a specific technology to become viable, you often need progress in several individual technologies to occur. Some of these will be exponential and surprise us, but many will see slower progress.
Either way, I suspect progress in robotics will be slower than AI, but I also think we'll see a lot of investment in robotics over the next decade given that AI opens up a lot of new potential applications for robotics.
I suspect any task that doesn't require extreme battery life or extreme dexterity will be doable by robots much sooner than most people think today. I think we could have decent-ish humanoid robots within a decade – robots that can prepare food, clean hotel rooms, empty bins, etc. I think Elon's bet on Optimus is quite likely to be viewed as very ahead of the curve with time.
However, it will take much longer for robots to do everything a human body can, but then most jobs don't require we push the physical limits of human body.
That's why I think 60% is reasonable. And even then I'm not saying it will happen, I just don't think that's a bad bet if given even odds.
My guess is that the deployment of other types of robots will often be a similarly slow grind.
That's unlike the Internet, smart phones, and coding agents, which got user adoption at a much quicker pace.
It's 2026, one year after your predicted date, and that still hasn't happened though.