There’s widespread awareness in 2023 that AI has started advancing extremely rapidly, but there’s less awareness of many of the second-order effects resulting from that. One of those is that AI advances will quickly feed into robotics advances. Robots after all are pure AI embodied into our 3D physical world.

Another thing I don’t think people appreciate is that robots of the future may be cheap and ubiquitous. We tend to think of them as humanoid, relatively rare, and somehow “special” because of their near-humanness. Data in Star Trek is a well-known embodiment of this idea.

But what if future robotics is dominated by hundreds of millions of small animal-sized robots, and maybe billions or hundreds of billions of insect-sized robots?