Niklas: Hi and a huge welcome to you, my lovely listeners. So glad you're here. Today you're joining me for a chat with Robert. Robert is an independent spatial computing futurist and analyst based in San Jose, California, with a deep focus on AI, augmented reality, robots and autonomous vehicles. Robert, so nice to have you.

Robert Scoble: It's great to be here. How are things going?

Niklas: I things are awesome. And I think this is, I'm really looking forward to this because with how the world is evolving currently and the advances in AI, think we will see a huge explosion in spatial computing and edge computing and also in immersion and in, I think a new world. And I would really like to get your thought on what is going on.

Robert Scoble: Glasses are coming. That'll be a big trend for next year when ⁓ Google's coming out later this year with a pair like this with cameras that can do ⁓ a lot of fun things. These are the Bitters. X-reels are out there. These give me a 50-inch monitor in front of me. They're pretty cool. Yeah, the world is shaken, man. I got what? $110 billion this morning.

Niklas: Yeah, yeah, I just read it with Softbank, Nvidia and Amazon. I Microsoft, I think. That was my biggest surprise on the numbers, but maybe I missed something. Yeah, it's very big.

Robert Scoble: big Amazon and open AI, you know, and, ⁓ soft bank and a few others kick it in some dollars.

Niklas: Yeah, I think, and there's a huge shift coming, suppose in the software world, but what I still think we have not figured out devices yet, right? So we're still stuck on mobile phones. We're still stuck on computers. We're still stuck in web browsers. What is coming? I think with glasses, probably, but also other things, right?

Robert Scoble: Well, eventually we get to bring computer interfaces, you know, 10 years from now. But and robots, you know, I've been studying the robot world a lot. But, you know, glasses like this, these ones are a little thick. You know, they're not the kind of thing you're going to wear while walking around a shopping mall or going to a baseball game or something like that. But they're getting closer. Right. They're certainly closer than my Apple Vision Pro, which is a Scoop a mask on your face. ⁓ And Apple is expected to come late next year with a pair of glasses. So we'll see how this world evolves and how useful it is and how much of the holodeck that I dream about comes. I wrote two books about spatial computing and I want a Formula One track on my coffee table in front of me. big screens all around me. And that's what these glasses really can bring us eventually. But we're still a couple years away from having, you know, something pretty nice.

Niklas: What do you think is the biggest challenge? it battery life or where does it currently?

Robert Scoble: It's a whole lot of things. mean, these vichirs don't have cameras, so they can't see the world around you, can't do augmented reality. These are great for business people who want to work on a screen and it's corded, so you got to plug it into a phone or a laptop while you're in the economy and going to Europe or something like that. ⁓ And it's certainly better than the small screen you're going to have on your laptop or on your iPhone or the seat back in front of you for working or watching a movie or something like that. But this is a stepping stone. I mean, when you talk to the engineers who are building these things, the optics are really hard. The putting little tiny computers in there that do a lot of work really hard. because it can't heat up, right? If it heats up, it hurts your face and you take them off. And then battery life is a big problem. That's why these are corded to your phone or to your laptop. So it takes the power out of the phone or the laptop to run them. You know, it's all a challenge. You know, I'm glad I'm not an engineer because they've been working on these things for 15 years and in companies like Apple and Google and snap and other places. And it's hard to put it all together. And then, you know, once it gets all put together, then you have to have content, you know, and look at what Apple has been spending on. ⁓ you know, TV studios and they bought the rights to formula one. You know, it's real hard to see how anybody's going to compete with an Apple of the world ⁓ on these glasses. So my prediction is, you know, in two years, you and I have a pair of the Apple ones and maybe a fair of the Google ones, maybe a fair of the meta ones, but the Apple ones should should win in this marketplace. Right.

Niklas: Yeah, so also now AI and machine learning has evolved so much and also taking the spotlight a bit. When I go back during my PhD, we had a virtual reality cave, like the old things that you had a while back. And then we had the glasses as well. And I always thought already when you just stand around the table and you can see, for example, the model of a product you are developing and you can discuss it like the holodeck, you have it. Not really, but everybody has glasses. You stand around the table, you have a very different way of communication than you have today. And I think this has not gone away the slightest bit. think the value of these things is still there. The technology is just really, really hard.

Robert Scoble: Yeah. I mean, if we were wearing Apple vision pros, we could do a lot of that already. It's just, got a scuba mask on your face and we're trying to capture video for 2d audience. Cause everybody's on their phones, you know, watching this stuff, right. Or a laptop. And, ⁓ you know, it's just hard to, ⁓ see how we can move into the 3d world, but it's coming. I, you know, That world where we can have most of our audience in 3D, yeah, it's probably five to 10 years away. But you and I in a pair of glasses doing something in a 3D studio soon, probably next year.

Niklas: I think that that's already so much by you. If you don't have, if you could really interact with virtual prototypes, just of products in the same way you can interact with physical prototypes. have a real digital twin in real, like it behaves physically the same way as the final product at an early stage. And you can interact with it. can touch it, but you can otherwise you can interact with it as if it. was realizing this is very large.

Robert Scoble: Later this year, open, open AI and, um, Apple are coming out with a camera. think of a, a small device about this bag with, you know, 180 degree camera. Well, it could see everything. could see this coffee mug and I could capture it and then share it with you. Right. And that'll be interesting to see how that world evolves. think next year is going to be a vague year for. really changing how media looks, how we can capture experiences and share them with each other, right? A baby's walking for the first time. I'll have a camera on here or a camera that I sit on the coffee table while the baby's walking. All of a I can share that in new way. And AI is radically changing how I think about this stuff. Because like Google Gemini, is really good at multimodality. Every, it understands everything it sees in the world. You know, you aim it at a Toyota and knows what kind of, what kind of Toyota that is, or you aim it at a plate of food. knows everything about the food. All right. And so now you can start seeing a little camera like this that you talk to will help you cook dinner or help you shop at a shopping mall or aim it at a screen and it can help me do my spreadsheets. ⁓ you're doing Excel. today. You need help doing a pivot table, right? And we're just a couple days ago, Perflexi came out with a new kind of computer that runs in browser, can watch what you're doing on screen. Well, now you're going to start seeing these companies start to put it all together. So it's a permanent assistant that helps you all day long.

Niklas: But it seems so obvious. I've never thought about it, but it's really obvious that if you have a live video stream, these models, they have learned YouTube everything. So they can already kind of predict what you want. Like if you show it to the camera, they should actually be able to tell you, just find the product on whatever it is, find the product on Amazon. ⁓

Robert Scoble: Yeah, You should be able to just click on my shirt and, you know, and they, could go, ⁓ that's a Scotty vest shirt. I, know, I could buy that for you for $80 on Amazon or whatever it costs on amazon.com or, go to Scotty vest and buy it. Right. And the same thing should be true of every, literally everything in your home. Real quick. Like by the end of the year, you're going to start seeing that kind of thing. Yeah.

Niklas: Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, think if you have...

Robert Scoble: And then you can change my shirt. know, you don't like the shirt I picked out to wear today. can click on that. want to put them in a stripes or something like that.

Niklas: Yeah, can't even if you just wear it and you have really managed to get a live camera feed. I mean, it will be relatively easy to predict intentions. So if you, for example, hold a product in front of it, it could check your dietary requirements and if it complies with that or like for food, for example, and for other things as well, could even check if this fits your style of cups on your cupboard at home, like what you like. as soon as these... These ⁓ tools are able to at least synthesize large amounts of video feed. And you can constantly wham and they get constant video. Even if they don't save it, I think it's easy to track intention and you can really build interesting use cases. I never thought about it.

Robert Scoble: Yep. Absolutely. So yeah. So what's, what else is going on in the world? I, you know, there's, I've had my AI analyzing, uh, uh, access, uh, just analyzed, uh, 42,000 feeds, uh, 42,000 posts, you know, and it's, talking about open AI, of course, you know, I, mean, you know, this is something else AI now lets us build software. And you really don't need to know too much about how to build software. You just need to know the problem you're trying to solve. know, hey, I'd need an app to track my calories or I need an app to go through all of X and analyze it all. Right. And it's amazing.

Niklas: Yeah, that's, so what, what I find really interesting is this discussion around ZAST, what will happen to software as a service, because I believe we were just, with the resources getting cheaper, so programming getting infinitely cheaper and we are converging towards zero. We just see a lot more products. Like we started to light up the cities when we had light, we didn't leave them dark or we didn't use the same amount of light. just used a lot. more and we put streetlights everywhere when it got cheap. So I think the same will happen in software. Actually, we will just build a really large amount of niche software. I'm kind of opposite talk. think a lot of what a lot of people think that that there will be an app poker balloons software. Well, I think I don't see that yet. I think, yes, we will need less engineers in companies, but we will just see an explosion in software towards. so much more out there. What do think?

Robert Scoble: I absolutely I'm seeing it. You know, before a baseball player just shared what he built. He says, I don't know how to code. I'm a baseball player, but I needed to analyze all the pitches and all the catches on the field. So I fed, you know, fed in my data to ⁓ a chat, GPT or something like that and had it filled in half. And he showed the app. mean, This is democratizing software to everybody now that you can build an app to fulfill a need that you have. And that's real exciting because now we don't have to spend $100,000 to build an app like that. It might cost you a hundred or $500. The app I built to analyze all of X cost me about $2,000. because the XAPI costs money mostly. But for $2,000, sounds expensive on the top of it, but. just two years ago, I would have had to spend, you know, $100,000 to do that. I would have to hire a software engineer to help me do this. And I don't even think it would have ever gotten done. First of all, I don't have the hundred grand to pay for something like that. But second of all, it's just hard for that engineer to build the infrastructure, to build the databases, to build the security checks, to build the unit tests, make sure it always works. I mean, this new world of software is completely insane. just really radically cheap and brought down the cost. So this means we're going to see a lot more companies, a lot more ideas, like a baseball player building a cool little app. You're going to see a lot more businesses automate themselves in a way that they never even thought they could. Right. So it's quite exciting. It's a little bit scary. If you're a software engineer, you went to Stanford University and spent $250,000 to get your education. Um, you know, what, does that person do to get a starting job in the software industry right now? That's a little scary, but, for the rest of us, it's very exciting.

Niklas: I think that's generally a challenge and I don't want to discuss it too deeply, but generally junior roles are the ones that's going to suffer now. think like entry level, be it associates in whatever industry, if you go into consulting, a lot of the work that you did in the beginning or that I also did when I entered consulting after doing my PhD, they had just a lot of tasks that you... that are not needed at that extent anymore because a lot can be automated.

Robert Scoble: And did you write a lot of reports?

Niklas: Yeah, but I also did research. built financial models. like these, these kinds of things. I... Yeah.

Robert Scoble: Yeah. Hey, you can do that in 10 minutes now. Build me a financial model for this business. Here's a little bit of data, right? In 10 minutes, it comes back. Here's your financial model. Here's your report, right?

Niklas: Yeah. And I think it was very good training for me. So I would never want to miss it. I had a very good time there, but I think a lot of what I did today, today, you just really don't need it anymore. That's a sad story.

Robert Scoble: That's the advantage you have because you know what the customer wanted, right? You know what the boss wanted. You know the industry. You have a vocabulary. Now you're a superhuman with these tools because you can go into a company and say, here's your financial report. Here's your industry report. Here's... ⁓ your new architecture, here's your new software to do the thing that you just asked me to do. And you can be much more iterative, but you have a superpower because you have the knowledge. The average everyday person doesn't know what a financial report is, you know, or anything like that.

Niklas: Yeah. that's why I'm also not so worried about senior software engineers, at least personally, because you need to know the architecture. I still, at least today, when I use Cloud Code, I need to know what I wanted to build. give instructions. I know how to get something on service very fast. I can build things really, really fast, but that depends on me. At least at this point in time, it might change, but at this point in time, it still depends on...

Robert Scoble: Yeah.

Niklas: or me having an idea of what I want and where the breaking points would be if the scales later on. Maybe it gets solved that I don't want to question, but currently that's the case.

Robert Scoble: Now, you know, you don't want me doing your surgery day, you know, even though a robot might be able to do the surgery and it's 99.99 % AI done. You don't want me in the surgery room because I don't have the vocabulary. don't have the skills to notice when the thing goes wrong. And it's still not to the place where it's a hundred percent, right? If it was a hundred percent, you don't even need a surgeon, right? You just go in and sit in front of a machine and it does it. That's not the case in many things. So. There's still a role for humans, you know, and there will be for a long time. I think, you know, humans are adaptable and we learn new things and we innovate and we use these tools to build new things that we just couldn't build before. Right.

Niklas: Yeah. So I 100 % think that this is true. that also today what people get paid in their jobs is normally value based. So you get hired for the value you provide. And I think that people will find opportunities where they provide value. That's my expectation of the future that this basic, very fundamental truth doesn't change.

Robert Scoble: Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot more entrepreneurialism. This is going to be an explosion of small companies that people like you, maybe you can't get a corporate job anymore because ⁓ that's gone, but you have the skills to build a new kind of company to answer a business need. And you know where the customers are. have relationships you've built over your careers, right? And you can walk in there and go, Hey, we got a new thing for you.

Niklas: Yeah. So I think that is definitely true. then basically looking back at what you have done, I think you wrote the fourth transformation back in 2016. Looking at a few of your predictions and also what is now happening in the accelerated world, what do you think?

Robert Scoble: Well, one of the chapters in that book was about robo taxis. Well, robo taxis are just starting to get real, right? Six years, seven years later. ⁓ talked a lot about spatial computing, about the effect of glasses like this, that's coming, right? So it still hasn't really happened at scale yet. The AI and the world models we talked about, the world models are gonna be what drives these glasses in the future. That's just starting to really get real. A lot of the companies and the techniques are starting to get much more mature in this world. So yeah, I mean, I should pull out the book. Let me get my latest book. And we talk about spatial computing and why now. This was six years ago, right? We talk about transportation, ⁓ automating that's just starting to happen at some scale. you know, how many people have had a ride in an autonomous vehicle? That few million. Yeah. ⁓ here, if you live in San Francisco, they're everywhere, but normal everyday people haven't even considered getting in one of those yet. Right. So, ⁓ that's going to radically change over the next one to four years. Right. You know, we talk about virtual worlds appearing. Well, that hasn't really happened at scale, but the world models that have been popping out of the woodwork lately tells you there's something really deep there. ⁓ World models being ⁓ AI that's created by ingesting a lot of video that can create ⁓ real time worlds around you and other things. ⁓ You know, Fifi Lee, who's ran AI at Stanford University, started Virtual Worlds. You got Google Genie 3 building a virtual world. You got Oliver Cameron, who used to run the autonomous car company, Cruise, that got sold to GM. He's building a world model. And I'm forgetting about 10 of them. Right? So there's a whole bunch of stuff happening there. What else did we predict? know, virtual trading and banking. Well, you're seeing that happening. The people who are getting these open clause running on a Mac mini, they're starting to hook up a Solana wallets to them and having their AI agents building all sorts of stuff. And that's the whole thing. You're seeing, you know, spatial business, which is an always predicted world. Well, that's, that's happening. Right. So yeah, six years ago, was a little bit ahead. Yeah. Now, now it's all catching up. Now I have to do another book on brain computer interfaces to be, you know, six to 15 years ahead of everybody.

Niklas: Yeah, think so. That's the obvious next step, right? So first it will be voice input, think. currently typing is just really slow. So speaking is a lot faster than trying to type something into a computer. And then we would try to just directly input.

Robert Scoble: or your phone. Yeah, I'm using a typeless and whisper flow and some others ⁓ to let me talk to the computer. And, you know, when I first saw AI at Microsoft research, I used to work at Microsoft 20 years ago, right? And Kaifu Lee showed me natural language processing AI. ⁓ It couldn't even understand me in a quiet conference room. Typhless, I'm at a ⁓ Swedish House Mafia concert and I was talking to it and it was understanding me in the loudest, ⁓ craziest environment you could think of. And it's just amazing what AI now can do with your voice. And I think... more and more people are gonna understand that talking is a far better way to talk with AI than trying to type. I totally agree with you.

Niklas: And when we look at it, I think this is also a really large opportunity. First of all, I want to agree that I think I built some machine learning models back in 2018, 2019, and we just did predictions. There was no text. This was basically statistics and some predictions of values. at that time, I looked at the work OpenAI was doing. They weren't really famous. yet, but they had done some very nice foundational work in the work in setting up something called OpenAI Gym, which they thought would be the environment where they could test all the AIs again. So then they built the LLMs and it started all exploding. think I would have never predicted that.

Robert Scoble: Yeah, totally agree. It's, it's crazy. mean, Siri was launched in my house and that was the first consumer app to use AI, uh, in 2009. Right. So not too long ago. And, and what we have today is just like, wow, compared to that. I mean, even a little app like Wabi lets you create mobile apps on your mobile phone that are agentic using AI, very advanced compared to what Siri was doing. it's like, wow, the AI world is just changing everything about our lives.

Niklas: Yeah. And then I always wonder what is next. ⁓ I think there's some, so also I read the transformer paper. looked at it. It felt obvious that there was more, but I still don't know the limit. Probably nobody really does how far they would get with it. And also it's interesting. I think there are some people in the space working on other architectures and trying to build something else. think famously Jan Leckun left

Robert Scoble: No.

Niklas: Meta, example, to start his own company. one of the minds, I think.

Robert Scoble: He's building a world model company. Yeah, ⁓ I'm using a new kind of AI called a cognitive architecture that gives much better answers than chat GPT or anthropic. And that's just starting, you know, only a few companies have access to that. I'm the first human that's not at a company to use his Brayden Labanji system. ⁓ You're starting to see breakthroughs that are going to come. I'm seeing a lot of AI white papers on people are really trying to see what's the next step beyond a transformer based large language model that runs these things. And ⁓ there's a lot of work going on. yeah, what is next? It's hard to figure it out. But what I can predict is artificial intelligence is going to get better and cheaper over time. That's a pretty easy prediction to make. ⁓ If we meet again in three years, we're going to see that world. It's going to be faster. It's going to be better at understanding us. It's going to be better at understanding the world around us. And you're going to start seeing robots everywhere. You're going to start seeing autonomous cars everywhere, right? In three years, this whole world is about the deeply change. And you and I probably have a pair of Apple or Google glasses on and we're talking to things in the air, like a virtual being. I've seen a virtual being that just sits on the chair next to you and talks with you. Right. And that's in the R and D laughs. ⁓ it's that kind of thing is coming in the next 18 months and people are like, what, what are you talking about? Yeah, you know, you're gonna have Donald Trump sitting on the couch next to you. What do mean? And why would I want to do that? Well, you could talk to Donald Trump about what's going on in the white house right now. And it'll be up to date. I, when I'm Vizar and Elav, you know, the AI underneath is doing research all over the internet real quick to find the latest news. And then Donald Trump's talking to you about what's he's, what is he doing in the white house right now? What's happening in politics? What's going on in Iran? You know, and. It's a crazy world we're going to. This is a world where, you know, I'm maybe not looking at 2D news anymore. Maybe I'm just talking to a newscaster sitting on my couch or a weather person or a scientist or a baseball player about what's going on. Hey, what's going on in the San Francisco Giants right now? You know?

Niklas: I think Elon predicted that we will have some kind of edge device that will just guess what you want to see and will produce it. So this is, think this is a prediction of the future. Still a bit away. If you look at verticals, what do you think will be hit first?

Robert Scoble: There's a hat coming in two years. I've seen the hat and it has tens of thousands of sensors in it. And you just think I want a Diet Coke. And then your robot goes against you and brings it in. And that's hard to really understand, but that's coming soonish in two years.

Niklas: And it is accelerating so much. That is at least my feeling. already, think last year, we always said when we built some software, ⁓ just build for six months time span. So if it doesn't work today, just build it anyway. So if you don't need the revenue or whatever, and you can afford to wait, just build it and wait for the models to get better. And I think that still holds true today. So you can still just build it and assume that there will be progression. ⁓ think that's really exciting today because you can really think about the future and see it happen. And that's not always been true in the past. I think it's just so much faster.

Robert Scoble: Yeah, agreed.

Niklas: When you look at verticals like, ⁓ for example, healthcare or consumer defense, what do you think will change the fastest?

Robert Scoble: Ooh, both of those are changing quite a bit. ⁓ I, I look more at healthcare. went to him's last year in Las Vegas and I interviewed Sully AI, which is building a new kind of model for running ⁓ hospitals and helping doctors and helping nurses get superpowers. That's a hard industry to disrupt and change because it's very structured and very regulated. but it's coming, you can feel it. Let's go down to the retail level, a little smaller. I visit a dentist in Mill Valley. They automated everything in their dentist office. They automated how the customer finds them, how they talk with them, how they, when the customer comes into the office, they're always talking to an AI. There's a speaker with a microphone with a screen. ⁓ The dentist itself is wearing a little listening device on their shirt with a headphone and they can be talking to the AI as they're working on their patient. And that prepares them. They've automated all the billing and all the back office stuff, all the grunge work. What happened? Sales went up, customer satisfaction numbers went up, ⁓ employee morale went up. Even though there's a little fear that they might get automated away, right? Cause now all of a sudden the computers, AI is doing all the work, you know, but that didn't really happen, but their satisfaction numbers went up. so every business is going to have to do this. Otherwise you're going to be at a huge disadvantage to anybody who does. And that's going to happen from the small little dentist office up to the big hospital, right? It's just takes. more time for a big hospital to completely automate this way. Right. But soon you're going to be talking to your dentist on the phone. You're not going to be talking to your dentist. You're going to be talking to an AI and it's going to tell you where to park and reorient your reschedule your appointment because you can't make it today or whatever. All that will be done by an AI. And that has big impact. Then on the shifts in healthcare. You know, my, one of my best friends died at the age of 40 from colon cancer. They missed his colon cancer and they didn't understand what was going on, why he was sick. Cause he was too young to have colon cancer. Now, now they're charting, starting to change their attitude toward that. But soon you might have a little watch on, I have a camera on my toilet from a company called throne science. Looks at my poop, analyzes my poop. Right. And sees whether I have. a disease tells me more about that and gives me a lot of data on my phone to take to my dentist. We're about to go into a preventative ⁓ range of healthcare where you your AI can be watching you and watching your health on your skin, in your toilet, other places. And giving you warnings that you need to go and get something really checked out and giving you a lot of data about what it's seeing, which helps the doctor make a better judgment. Right. I'm seeing this over and over again that people are sharing these kinds of stories that the doctor missed something. They've fed in all their charts into chat, GPT or Google Gemini or something like that. And it caught something that the doctors missed. And that will be a continuing thing soon. We're going to be, I mean, I have a ring with a computer. interviewed, Ambique Micro that makes the chip in here. It can run a 200 million parameter AI model in your ring. So it can watch your health on your ring in a whole new way. This is a whole new field of, ⁓ medical devices that's going to keep coming over the next few years to. be preventative to warn you that you're about to have a heart attack. Go to the hospital. That alone saves you $11,000. That's because the ambulance, right? If you're coding and you're lying on the floor, first of all, you're probably not going to live. But second of all, the ambulance alone costs $11,000 to take you to the doctor. If you can get a ring that warns you a couple of days in advance that, Hey, we're noticing a pattern with your heart. You need to go check this out. Well, you can take an Uber ride to the hospital and cost you 10 bucks, right? That's a huge.

Niklas: Yeah, at all parts. think all this, I would say predictive work that is currently done or preventive work, however you want to call it, always requires a doctor visit still. So we don't really have much technology yet in that space. And it is obvious that the cost saving for the whole society is just so large if you can, if there are cheap ways to detect it.

Robert Scoble: Yeah.

Niklas: in early detection or early prediction. Just get it checked.

Robert Scoble: And then there's, absolutely. And give you more data about what's going on and ⁓ watch what you're eating. I mean, this is why we're going to want to have cameras watching ⁓ us eat and cook, right? ⁓ you know, and watching your poop. Yeah. Which is a freaky thing for people to consider. Why would I put a camera on my toilet? Cause it'll save your life. Right. and give you a lot of data about what's going on. ⁓ you know, it, it, it, it's a new world coming at us and it's a freaky new world, but you know, my ring has an AI computer on it. That's a freaky new world. ⁓ while all that's going on, my dad had a kidney transplant because his kidney, he had a degenerative kidney disease. ⁓ and I have the same thing, so I might need a kidney someday and, He had, when he got his kidney transplant, he had to take drugs every day for the rest of his life to keep his body from rejecting his new organ. Well, I visit a startup here in Silicon Valley that's 3d printing, very small structures, as small as your cells and your skin. And growing from your own body, your own stem cells on those three, three D structures to grow new human organs. So now they're, they're trying to finish off the science so that you could grow your own kidney in a, in a month or something like that. implant that in your body and then your body won't reject that. And there's so many companies working on very extraordinary science like that. There's, you know, that is going to lead to real breakthroughs in this world to really change health deeply.

Niklas: Yeah, I think that is amazing because there are probably a lot of things that could somehow be prevented, but the cost of society is just too high. And if it goes down by whatever way, it will become feasible. So I think that is a huge step. I also believe that the accident rates, for example, and traffic accidents will go down a lot by robot taxis. So generally. There are a lot of things that will change positively for us.

Robert Scoble: Now, you know, I, ⁓ two of my friends in high school got killed in car wreck. I studied automotive safety on my career. Just went to a funeral a couple of weeks ago of a guy who crossed a double yellow line and got in a head on crash, right? That shit shouldn't happen anymore, but we're, we're in a place where we have to see the technology, the Tesla and others, Nvidia is working hard on it. to bring that to everybody. And that'll take, you know, five to 10 years before every car has it. But it's coming. And you're seeing the Waymo's and the Zoos and the Tesla robo taxi starting up that by the end of the year, that's going to be obvious to everybody. That's a better way to get around. Certainly get around San Francisco or L.A. where these things are. We have a long way to bring it to, you know, eight billion people. ⁓ It's one thing to do it in San Francisco. It's another thing to do it in Mumbai and Bangalore and Shanghai and Moscow, all the different places in the world that have humans living.

Niklas: I forgot the numbers, roughly, think Elon once said ⁓ something, I think it was 2 billion. There are roughly 2 billion cars in the world and 100 million is the production volume per year. So if you replace all of them, it takes 20 years. So even if it's now starting, it would take a long time for all of them to be replaced by cars with modern hardware in them. That's, I think it's a change that will take a while.

Robert Scoble: The thing is we need to change our opinion that we're going to own a car because if you have an autonomous car, why do you have it in your driveway or your garage? That's stupid. That's $50,000 sitting in your driveway, not helping anybody out. Have it drive other people around your neighborhood. Now you don't need 100 million cars. You only need 10 million cars. Uber right now drives a lot of people around with 7 million people on the road right now worldwide. So you can take one car and serve many more people than you could before. And that's, that's, that's sort of what I wrote about in this book. When that really starts happening, that your economy becomes more efficient. You're spending as a household becomes more efficient because now you're not buying another $50,000, $80,000 car to, you know, to move you around. You're getting, getting a robot taxi and maybe you buy a car to put it in the network to get you paid. I'm already planning on buying a Tesla cyber cab, which has no steering wheel in it. Right. Why? I hope that never is in my driveway. I always want it to be on the road driving my neighbors around and sending me a check.

Niklas: And I think Elon said that as well. Once this works, you will not be able to justify to yourself buying any other car that cannot do it because the economics just will not work anymore for anything else.

Robert Scoble: Absolutely true. I've been doing a lot of consumer research with Waymo customers, interviewing them. They all tell me, I'm never buying a car again. I'm never driving again. Sorry. I'm never driving again. And I'm never taking an Uber again. That has deep implications on our auto industry, on our culture, on all sorts of things. You're seeing it in San Francisco. I know a guy who doesn't drive anymore. He takes a Waymo every day to work and has done that for two years. And people keep arguing with me, I like to drive. No, you don't like to drive. You have no fucking clue how shitty it is to drive. Even on a uncrowded curvy road. When you get in a Tesla, it's way better than you are. It's smoother. It lets you drink coffee. It's safer. You're never going to end up killing yourself like my friend did that I just went to a funeral for. People are so mental because they've been programmed by the auto industry for so long to want to have a drive. Right. BMW still calls themselves the ultimate driving machine. That's stupid in this world. Luxury is about having a car that drives you around. And it's so amazing to have one. And I'm so blessed to have one.

Niklas: I also, this would definitely be the mass market. There will always be the fun market with some sport cars, with some old cars that you really just drive to drive with them around. the main market, if I could, damn.

Robert Scoble: I don't know. I went to autonomous racing league in Abu Dhabi and they were racing around Formula 2 cars at 250 miles an hour and they were all AI, no humans in the car and they were beat. They beat the human. So someday soon, maybe you're going to be at a car race and you're going to be watching a robot go around and you're going to find that highly entertaining. Eight thousand people were in the stadium watching it and we're cheering and we're having a good time and there still is a human element there. There was the German team that beat the Yemen. They had 30 engineers building that car, right? So you're cheering for the engineers.

Niklas: crazy so the cars are different. was wondering. ⁓ I thought the AIs would be pretty similar.

Robert Scoble: The cars aren't different. They're Formula 2 cars. They took out the driver and put in a computer.

Niklas: Yeah, but the driver is the same or is it also different drivers? So the team builds a driver and the car only how does it work? Do you know?

Robert Scoble: Our was is a Formula Two car. It's a standard race car. The team took out the human, put in a computer and hooked it up to the drive systems. So the computer is driving the car. It's a racing car. It's a racing league. It's a A2. What is this A2RL?

Niklas: Alright.

Robert Scoble: ⁓ Abu Dhabi, ⁓ autonomous racing league and it's coming to America this year. hear, ⁓ and it's a lot of fun to go and see robots race. I've been to robot fights. I've been to robot races and people give me shit about that all the time. ⁓ what do you mean? ⁓ humans not race in a car that takes the fun of it. No, it doesn't.

Niklas: Edit some I was wondering how different is it actually are they really different speeds so this is a clear winner they close

Robert Scoble: They're better than the human. They're faster. They're faster. The AI can take a turn faster than a human because it doesn't get scared and it's smoother. You're not very smooth. Even even Max Verstappen at Formula One, he's not as good as the robots. The robots are going to beat him every time because they're better. And this is the lesson.

Niklas: and the reactions are better.

Robert Scoble: We need to change our culture to think that driving is fun. It's not fun. It's dangerous. It's not as smooth. It's not as convenient. It's not as cheap. So our whole world is about to change, but it's going to take some time to convince people. And some people are going to have to die before they, you know, that's, that's, they're never going to change. They're going to resist all the way to the grave. My son's grandfather told me, I'll die before touching a computer. And he did. He refused to touch a computer until he died.

Niklas: I think that's the choice. Looking forward at 2030, what do you think? We talked a lot about AI. We talked about glasses, like maybe robotics. What's going to happen in robotics?

Robert Scoble: In five years, four years, five years, you're going to humanoid robots are going to start generalizing in a very deep way. What that means is a humanoid robot can come up to the front of my house, hop out of a truck, grab a package, come up to the door, ring the doorbell, talk its way. Talk to me when I open the door, talk its way into the house and do anything I ask it to do. That's. generalized humanoid robot. That's about five years away. And right now, you're going to see a lot more humanoids this year. Tesla has Optimus. They're going to show off Optimus 3 in April. It's going to do a lot of things, but it's not going to be completely generalized like that. So it'll be good for a factory worker, right, for working in a factory somewhere or some small business. But ⁓ over the next five years, you're see that get more and more and more more capable until it gets to where it can do everything. And then you're going to I mean, Elon said he's already closed down the Fremont factory to prepare for making optimists in the car factory at scale. He can make about a million there in Fremont, and he's making about 10 million down in Texas. He says he's starting in about two years to make these. We all know Elon's a little advanced on dates, even if it's four years, it's coming and 11 million robots. You're going to see a lot of them everywhere, even in the first year.

Niklas: And I think he predicted that this market will be larger actually than the automotive market. So I'm really excited for that.

Robert Scoble: Absolutely. Like we said, you don't need as many cars when you get an autonomous car network in your neighborhood, right? You can share a car amongst all your neighbors, but everybody needs a robot, you know? And as costs come down in the robots, more people can afford them. And so you're going to see over the next five, 10 years, you're going to see a lot more, a lot more every year.

Niklas: That is a very interesting final words. Robert, thank you so much for being on this episode and thank you for listening. My lovely listener.

Robert Scoble: Thank you very much.