The Synths are coming.

For purposes of this post my definition of a “Synth” is a humanoid robot with at least the intellectual and emotional intelligence level of an average human. Their appearance may or may not be human, and will be determined by use case and local regulations.

Synths are coming, and likely far sooner than most people think.

The Synth industry will at some point be the largest ever by an order of magnitude (AI is not an industry, rather more of a raw material). It will also be the fastest growing, the quickest to reach $1 Trillion in annual revenue, and possibly the first to generate in excess of $10 Trillion in annual revenue.

The only potential contender I can imagine capable of surpassing the Synth market both in terms of growth rate and size would be a new healthcare industry that effectively cures aging.

The factor that will most limit the growth rate of the Synth market will be how quickly manufacturing capacity for the parts can be built (particularly semiconductors). A cure for aging would undoubtedly not have the same capacity baggage as the Synth market so the growth rate could be much quicker, and the market size would also obviously be hard to fathom.

Humanoid robots with sub-human level intelligence could arrive much sooner than AGI, but Synths will surely arrive no more than a few years after AGI. The process of developing the physical shell to house AGI is far simpler than developing AGI itself, but it is possible that there will be insufficient demand pre-AGI to draw in the investment dollars needed to build the shells.

If you believe AGI is coming then you must also logically conclude that Synths will be close behind. Not the legislative power of politicians, nor the societal constructs people are now accustomed to, nor even the moral qualms of billionaires will be capable of holding back the immense market demand for Synths.

Countries who limit their proliferation will quickly fall behind those that don’t. When they arrive Synths will be capable of doing anything a human can do and will be able to surpass human capabilities shortly thereafter. They will be stronger, smarter, more emotionally intelligent, more artistic and creative, and capable of working 20 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days per year (I say 20 instead of 4 to leave 4 hours to re-charge). Their long term impact on the climate (for those who care) will be a tremendous net reduction in human-driven change (including the production of greenhouse gases). Not only will they run on electricity generated from renewable sources, they will require no food or fresh water. And they will almost certainly result in an acceleration of the already strong trend of people having fewer babies. After all, sex with a Synth won’t require protection…

In fact, I believe that virtually all countries will welcome their arrival after surprisingly brief but apocalyptic cultural and political conflicts. Autocracies will want an army of workers and soldiers with perfect obedience, and the citizens of democracies will demand the right to never have to work again.

Synths will not only replace workers, they will - at least for many and especially the younger members of the population who don’t have the same mental baggage as us old folk (I’m 37) - replace friendships, spouses, sexual partners and all other roles that humans take on for each other. The wealthy will be surrounded by hordes of them and the less fortunate will find new Herculean discipline to post-pone small purchases so that they too can one day afford one. Or maybe, it will eventually be legislated that all humans have a right to ownership of at least one Synth, whose cost the government will subsidize.

It is virtually a law of nature that all things which are technologically possible will eventually come to exist so long as there is sufficient demand for them. Who wouldn’t want to own a Synth?

It is obvious that Synths are coming. It is also obvious that the timeline of their arrival will be around that of AGI. What is less obvious is what the rollout will look like. For starters, it seems unlikely that Synths will be permitted to take on appearances (or personalities for that matter) which are indistinguishable from humans - in the beginning. It is also obvious that HBO’s Westworld will seem perfectly prophetic with hindsight. Countries and independent jurisdictions (maybe Indian reservations in the United States?) that want to attract $$$ will permit appearances and uses of Synths that will be prohibited in most places.

Companies that produce the first Synths will initially sell them into industries with the most unpleasant and/or dangerous jobs. This will result in mass unemployment at the lower end of the income spectrum. Mass unemployment at the higher end of the income spectrum will probably start occurring just before and will be ongoing simultaneously due to AGI, and likely take place far more quickly due to the lack of constraints on manufacturing capacity. If a universal basic income isn’t already in place the Synths will surely be the catalyst needed to make it a reality.

I’m going to finish this post with a refresher on the shrinking time gap between unrecognizable realities. I’ve described this concept in a previous post (linked here), but I want to remind you again that if you want to accurately predict the future you must make predictions which sound downright looney or you will be sure to fall far short of reality.

Thanks to the shrinking time-gap, even predicting what life will be like near the end of the 2030s requires sounding insane today…

Imagine a person who falls asleep in the year 300,000 B.C. (our best guess as to when Homo Sapiens became the dominant hominid) and wakes up at some later date. How many years would have to pass before that person would wake up and believe that either God or aliens had granted to humanity wondrous new powers that had transformed life as it had been known?

The answer is between 150,000 and 250,000 years. That’s how long it would be before anthropologists estimate language arrived. Nothing else happened during that period that would have led our ancestor to believe that something magical had taken place (controlled use of fire had probably already occurred).

Flash forward to the year 70,000 B.C. and do the same exercise. If someone fell asleep and woke up at a later date how many years would need to pass for them to - once again - believe that God or Aliens had granted wondrous new powers to humans?

This time the answer is give or take 30,000 years. That’s how long it took for humans to create boats capable of fishing in the deep sea and to establish long-term settlements (as opposed to being perpetually itinerant). Seeing an ocean-fairing vessel or a settlement with permanent structures would have been mind-blowing to someone who had never seen either before.

We can do this exercise over and over (read my post about the exponential growth of progress to see more details on the underlying data).

If our hypothetical person went to sleep in the year 5,000 B.C. and woke up in the year 0 A.D. they would have seen the invention of plumbing, the wheel, written language, steel and the concept of “news”.

If our hypothetical person had fallen asleep in the 1970s they would have only needed to sleep for a few decades until waking to a world that had been completely transformed by the internet.

The same could be said of life before and after smartphones for the vast majority of people in developing countries. Remember, smartphones are what brought the internet (and still does) to the majority of its current users. Imagine trying to describe to a less fortunate individual living on $5/day in 2005 that they would soon be able to video chat with a loved one in a different country, and would have access to the world’s information from the palm of their hand…

We have reached a point where even a fifteen year period will render the world as we know it unrecognizable compared to today.