Om: Before you go, how should we correctly think about robotics and AI. Right now there is a hype way of thinking about it, there is a negative way of thinking about it. What is the right way?

Rodney: The right way of thinking about it is that appearance alone is not everything. There are things that are incredibly hard for us to do with technology at the moment, which we just don’t know how to do. So many of the promises of the hype of robotics and AI gloss over things we don’t know how to do well. We do not know how to manipulate things with robot hands. Everyone is excited about a robot hand, and Chinese companies are making the same mistake, thinking that it’s dexterous.

But the way that we do stuff with our hands, we have no way of reproducing, nor should we think that hands should be five-fingered. When this first structure appeared in animals, it was the first creatures that crawled out of the ocean onto the land. They had five bones to make pads that could be pushed around. This is an accident of evolution. Maybe in the future, the dexterous things will look more like sea anemones, lots of tentacles filled with cilia and they just pour stuff in and it gets manipulated.

I think the correct thing is not to think about it as being a duplication of humans. It’s never a duplication of humans that is the optimal solution or the most cost-effective solution. So it will be different from humans.

Om: The networks were overbuilt and then that allowed a company like Google to come in and build out its own network and offer search so cheaply.

Rodney: There is an upside. Let me tell you my upside version—thinking of how to use all these data centers once the crash comes in training generative AI models. There will be so much competition in these data centers, just sitting there waiting to be used. I’m not going to use it to mine bitcoin, but smart people would be thinking beyond the crash of how to use—as you said, the networks were there, they were overbuilt, they were ready. So I think these data centers are getting overbuilt. They’ll be ready to be used for something new. If you can figure out how to do that, if some kid can figure out how to do that, they’re going to be working right now on it in obscurity and poverty and then boom.