Last week, a robot dropped lunch at my doorstep. I tapped an app, ordered a burrito, and whoosh—a flying drone gently lowered my lunch into my front yard less than 10 minutes later.
Compare this to DoorDash, the Uber-like food delivery service. A human drives a 3,000 lb. car to lug a 1 lb. taco. A private limo for your lunch. Bonkers! Inefficient doesn’t begin to describe it.
Drones—or flying robots, as my kids call them—are a quirky novelty today. But soon, our cities will hum with delivery bots darting through the air. Our streets will purr with robotaxis gliding along, no steering wheel required.
After decades of sci-fi promises, robots are finally stepping out of the factory shadows and into our everyday lives… not as red-eyed Terminators bent on chaos, but as helpers.
Let’s dig into what’s new, why progress in robots is accelerating, and how startups are lighting the fuse for a future so awesome it’ll make your head spin.
Welcome to 2025, the year of the robot.
Rosey the Robot, the chrome-plated maid from The Jetsons. That’s the image that most people associate with robots.
Dozens of startups are building shiny metal people, each promising the perfect robotic Jeeves shuffling around like C-3PO. Choose your droid!
Source: Made Visual
Just last week, US startup Figure unveiled its new “humanoid” helper. Helix can pick up virtually any household object, even things it’s never seen before. I showed my kids the demo video, and they asked, “Is there a human in there?”
Impressive, but we’re getting caught up in humanoid hype. Nature spent eons crafting us to wobble on two legs and fiddle with five-fingered hands. Is it the best way to design a machine built from scratch? I don’t think so.
Why slap legs on a bot when wheels zoom faster? Why mimic our clumsy paws when a slick gripper could do better? Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered robots don’t need to look like us.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said, “Everything that moves will be robotic.” Jensen nailed it. We’re not just building metal men. We’re unleashing physical intelligence. The same breakthrough that gifted us ChatGPT is now disrupting the real world.
Today’s robots are little more than glorified Roombas. They can weld the same car part a million times. But move the target an inch, and they become useless. They’re expensive one-trick ponies.
Good news. Robots are getting brain transplants courtesy of AI.
Think about how you’d teach a child to fold laundry. You wouldn’t hand them a thousand-page manual covering every possible way a shirt could be crumpled. You’d show them a few times, and they’d figure it out.
Robots needed that thousand-page manual for every task, until now.
Startup Physical Intelligence recently showed off a robot that can fold laundry. The amazing thing is this bot learned by simply watching videos of humans folding clothes!
It adapts on the fly, like a kid picking up a new chore. Another demo had it bussing tables. This is Rosey the Robot, but smarter and minus the apron.
Source: Finyear
We’re on the cusp of a future where you can simply tell a robot what you want done, and it’ll figure out how to do it—even if it’s never done that task before. Imagine telling your robo cleaner, “Hey, bot, tidy the garage,” and it figures it out.
The same AI that saves time folding laundry will save lives, too.
Johns Hopkins University and Stanford researchers created a surgical robot that learned complex procedures simply by watching videos of human surgeons. Not only did it match human performance in delicate tasks like suturing. It also did them 30% faster.
If you needed lifesaving surgery, would you trust a tired human or a machine that never gets distracted and has learned from every top surgeon in history? I choose Dr. Robot.
The secret behind these innovations is the same breakthrough that gave us ChatGPT: transformers.
Transformer algorithms allowed computers to understand how each word in a sentence relates to every other, predicting what comes next. Now, they’re helping robots grasp the relationships between objects and actions in the physical world.
I was in San Francisco last year talking with Bob McGrew, OpenAI’s first chief researcher. He said, “Robotics companies now are where AI language companies were five years ago. We’re about to see the ChatGPT moment for robots.”
AI is giving robots real eyes that actually understand what they’re looking at. Real brains that can figure things out on the fly.
The mind-bending part is these new AI-powered robots can share what they learn with their droid friends. When one robot figures out a better way to do something, it can instantly teach every other robot in its network. Imagine thousands of surgical robots all learning from each other’s experiences, getting better with every operation.
The ChatGPT moment for robotics is here. While everyone is focused on when they’ll be able to order humanoid helpers around with a feather duster, real robots are already transforming our world. Meet the robotaxis, flying robots, and maker bots.
I had my first robotaxi experience in San Francisco last November. Magical is the only word for it.
It’s a surreal experience to see the steering wheel turn by itself. The strangest part was the silence. No awkward small talk about the weather or traffic… just the soft hum of Waymo’s electric engine and the distinct feeling that I had arrived in the future.
When I took a regular Uber to the airport later, it felt like trading in my iPhone for one of those old Nokia bricks. Self-driving cars have had so many false starts, I don’t think people realize just how good they’ve gotten in the past year.
Waymos are ferrying kids to soccer practice around San Francisco today. Waymo is already picking up more passengers than Lyft in San Francisco.
Tesla’s self-driving tech used to be like a student memorizing a massive rulebook. Yellow light, slow down. Spot a cyclist? Give them space. It memorized 300,000+ rules, which made the system brittle.
Tesla threw out the rulebook and replaced all that human code with an AI system. Instead of following rules, the car now makes decisions based on what it sees.
Tesla’s self-driving tech improved 100X in 2024, measured by how often humans needed to take over the wheel. Thanks to AI, we squeezed a decades’ worth of progress into one year!
The skeptics who claim self-driving cars are decades away are about to be humiliated.
Robotaxis will be the first widespread AI robots that change people’s lives. There’s something extremely exciting and inspiring about seeing a car drive itself.
If you live in or visit a city with robotaxis—Waymo in San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix… Zoox in Las Vegas… Wayve in London… or Pony.ai in Shanghai—take a ride and experience the future for yourself.
“Drones are the most significant advancement in military technology since the stirrup.” That’s what a former US Navy SEAL turned defense tech investor told me in London last week.
The stirrup is that simple metal loop that lets horse riders stand tall in the saddle. It transformed battlefields by creating the medieval knight—that armored, lance-wielding warrior who could tower over enemies on horseback. This small piece of metal shaped warfare for a thousand years.
When a battle-hardened vet tells me flying robots are the biggest military innovation since then, I’m all ears.
We’re severely underestimating drones because of their split personalities. They’re trivial enough to deliver your burrito but serious enough to decide the outcome of wars.
If you missed it, we wrote about AI-powered drones reshaping war here.
Remember, in late 2024, when the whole country lost its mind about drones hovering over New Jersey? We’re not prepared for the changes drones will bring.
Today, mystery drones loitering above our heads literally make national news headlines. Aliens! Iran! CIA mind games! Before long, flying robots will be as common as pigeons. You won’t even bother looking up.
Amazon’s gearing up for 500 million drone deliveries by 2029. Zipline partnered with the Cleveland Clinic to parachute prescription meds to your doorstep. If you happen to be robbed in Santa Monica, a police drone will launch automatically, reaching crime scenes within three minutes.
From burritos to battlefields, pizza to penicillin, autonomous flying robots will infiltrate every aspect of our lives. Drones are the new phones and the single most underrated innovation today.
They’re also really cool. I watched 1,200 synchronized drones light up the night sky over the Bay Bridge, morphing into a gigantic, glowing Nike sneaker in midair. Flying robot light shows will replace fireworks at every major holiday within five years.
Source: @NickDePaula on X
I’m planning a trip to El Segundo in Southern California soon to meet startups at the forefront of the drone revolution. Think cloud-seeding drones to tweak the weather and dirt-cheap war bots. More soon.
“Made in America” feels like a wistful nod to the good ol’ days. Take phones. A startup called Purism created a fully “Made in the USA” phone. Great, except it costs $1,600… when an Android phone that does the same job costs $300.
For decades, Rust Belt towns bled out as jobs fled to cheap-labor countries. That’s the old math. AI-powered robots change that equation.
Remember, AI allows robots to learn new things by simply watching videos. Soon, the same robot that unloads trucks in the morning could help assemble products in the afternoon and organize inventory at night. Goodbye, clunky, one-trick machines. Hello, jack-of-all-trades helpers.
Now, robots can work 24/7 and learn new tasks overnight.
If America plays this right, we will widen our economic lead on the rest of the world, including China. Cheap energy + great infrastructure + AI know-how = a much bigger advantage than simply low wages.
Picture a factory with a handful of humans babysitting thousands of robots. Now, picture those factories popping up everywhere. We could produce 1,000X more stuff for a fraction of today’s cost. When THAT happens (it’s already started), it could create trillions of dollars in wealth.
AI-powered robots transform “Made in America” from teary-eyed nostalgia into a symbol of cutting-edge innovation. The future, not the past.
Amazon is America’s largest “robo employer,” with an army of 750,000 bots. Over three-quarters of its deliveries are handled by robots somewhere from warehouse to doorstep.
Step inside food giant Nestle’s factories, and you’ll find Boston Dynamics’ robodog strutting around inspecting pipes and gears.
Source: Boston Dynamics
Meanwhile, IKEA now employs 250+ autonomous drones in its humongous warehouses to count inventory and find out-of-place items. Spot the flying robot.
Source: Supply Chain Movement
Today, a lone YouTuber can rake in millions with a camera and a Wi-Fi signal. That kind of small-scale success story has never been possible in manufacturing. It always required big plants, big crews, and big bucks. Until now.
For the first time, AI robotics makes it possible for small teams to build manufacturing empires from their garages. A kid (maybe yours) with a laptop and a vision could be the next manufacturing mogul. They’ll kick back while bots lift, build, and ship.
AI-powered robots can unleash a wave of innovation and wealth creation unlike anything we’ve seen in generations. Flying robots deliver, surgical bots heal, and maker bots build. I’m sold.
What do The Terminator… I, Robot… and Westworld have in common? They’re all blockbuster movies depicting robots as killer machines gone rogue.
I can’t think of a single major sci-fi movie in the past 50 years that’s been pro-robot. Hollywood has a killer-bot obsession. Despite what LA movie directors programmed us to believe, robots aren’t out to get us.
Famed historian Niall Ferguson dropped a great line in London last week: “We need to tell better stories than Hollywood.” Damn right.
Remember Sarah de Lagarde from an early Rational Optimist diary? She lost her arm to a train. Now, thanks to an AI-powered bionic arm, she’s hugging her kid again. Think about how good that must feel.
Our brains evolved to fixate on threats, not opportunities. Pessimism is easy. Rational optimism takes effort. Make that effort. Be the voice of rational optimism in your circle. Share stories like Sarah’s.
As bots become part of our daily lives, people will lose their minds. New Jersey’s drone panic was a teaser.
Last weekend, startup Clone Robotics released a short clip of its muscular humanoid robot “twitching” to life. Cue a total meltdown in the comments section: “Nightmare fuel.” “Terminators are here.”
Source: Next Big Future
The panic is coming, and it’ll be loud. Fear sells papers, always has. The best way to avoid getting sucked in is to know history.
My friend Louis Anslow runs the excellent website Pessimists Archive. He documents all the ways people freaked out about old technologies when they were new.
Every major technological leap—from the steam engine and cars to the internet—was met with panic, with cries of job losses and dystopian futures.
Louis’s post, Robots Have Been About to Take All the Jobs for 100 Years, is gold. It shows old newspaper clippings from every decade since the 1920s, swearing bots will gut us. In 1961, experts predicted most unskilled jobs would vanish within a decade. Sound familiar?
Source: Pessimists Archive
Yet today, despite more automation than ever in human history, we have more good jobs and more demand for labor than ever. It’s not a fluke. Every time, we end up wealthier, healthier, and happier.
As we approach the mass robot panic, know the bots aren’t out to get us. They’re here to crank abundance to 11.
Robots are here to handle the drudgery, freeing human creativity for higher pursuits.
A solo hustler in a garage will soon be able to crank out a factory’s worth of gear with bots doing the heavy lifting. New empires, new wealth, new shots at the good life.
History shows that those who seize technological change thrive, while those who resist get left behind. Be a seizer.
Robots are abundance machines. No, they won’t steal all our jobs. That’s a topic I’m dying to write about. Want to hear it? Email me at members@rationaloptimistsociety.com.
Rational Optimists, buckle up. The robot revolution is here, and it’ll be the most exciting chapter of human progress yet.
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Writer: Stephen McBride
Editor: Dan Steinhart
Rational Optimist Society: ROS
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