➡ The future will be filled with AI and robots, including personal AI companions that can assist us in various tasks, from babysitting to teaching. These robots will learn and adapt to our lives, becoming an integral part of our daily routines. The development of AI technology will also lead to a significant increase in productivity and prosperity, with the cost of goods and services potentially trending towards zero. However, this advancement may also lead to a crisis of meaning as AI becomes capable of performing tasks better than humans.
➡ The future of the web could be shaped by agent-based systems, which are AI programs that can perform complex tasks. These systems are expected to evolve beyond just modeling the world, to actively participating and completing tasks in it. By 2025, even skeptics might be surprised by the capabilities of these agents. This could lead to AI systems being given tasks similar to those assigned to intelligent humans, creating valuable outcomes.

You know, people have asked me, you know, is AI going to take your job? AI used by somebody else will take your job. A future where you’re just surrounded by robots is for certain. And I’m just excited about having my own R2-D2. It’ll probably be a different physical embodiment, but it’s always R2. You know, so my R2 is going to go around with me. Sometimes it’s in my smart glasses. Sometimes it’s in my phone. Sometimes it’s in my PC. It’s in my car. So R2 is with me all the time, including, you know, when I get home, you know, where I left a physical version of R2.

And, you know, whatever that version happens to be, you know, will interact with R2. And so I think the idea that we’ll have our own R2-D2 for our entire life, and it grows up with us, that’s a certainty now. And they’ll learn how to be a robot in Omniverse cosmos. And we’ll generate all these plausible, physically plausible futures, and the robots will learn from them, and then they’ll come into the physical world, and, you know, it’s exactly the same. Everything that moves will be robotic someday, and it will be soon. Supposed the work that you do continues to be important, but the effort by which you do it went from, you know, being a week long to almost instantaneous, you know, that the effort of drudgery basically goes to zero.

I think we won’t have universal basic income, we’ll have universal high income. The good future of AI is one of immense prosperity, where there is an age of abundance, but anything that is of manufactured good or provided service will, I think, with the advent of AI plus robotics, that the cost of goods and services will trend to zero. That’s the good future, of course. You know, in my view, that’s probably 80% likely. But I think that maybe there’ll be some crisis of meaning, because the computer can do everything you can do a bit better.

But once you have general purpose humanoid robots, really you can build anything. I think that there’s no actual limit to the size of the economy. It actually gets way crazier when you think about the Optimus robot, which is really a humanoid robot that is intended to be able to do anything you want it to do. To be your companion, it can be at your house, it can babysit your kids, it can teach them, be a teacher, it can do factory stuff. I think that the ultimate ratio of, say, how many super useful humanoid helper droids do you want? Who doesn’t want a C3PO? But a C3PO plus R2D2 plus, you know, plus, it would be pretty awesome.

I think everyone in the world is going to want one, like literally everyone. And then there’ll be, obviously, robots in industry making stuff. I think the ratio of humanoid robots to humans will probably be at least two to one, something like that. One to one for sure, which means somewhere on the order of 10 billion humanoid robots, maybe 20 or 30. We’re aiming to have several thousand of those built this year. Initially, we’ll test them out at Tesla factories. But then, assuming things go well, we’ll 10x that output next year. So we’ll aim to do maybe 50 to 100,000 humanoid robots next year, and then 10x that again the following year.

So we expect to, you know, hopefully do, I don’t know, 20 or 30 patients next year, or this year, I should say, with the upgraded Neuralink devices. And our first product is where we’re trying to enable people who have lost their brain body connection, and it enables people to control their computer or their phone just by thinking. And then our next part will be blind sites, that even if somebody has lost both eyes or has lost the optic nerve, or they’ve been blind from birth, we can interface directly with the visual cortex of the brain and enable them to see.

And we already have that working in monkeys. And ultimately, we think if you have a second Neuralink device that is past the point where the spinal damage occurred, we can actually transmit the signals from the brain past where essentially the wires are broken and enable someone to walk again. I would guess that what will happen is that the technology will get integrated into like everything that we do, which again is why I think it’s really important that it’s open source and that it’s widely available. So it’s not just like one company or one government kind of monopolizing the whole thing.

And I’d guess that if we do it in that way, we’ll all just kind of have superpowers, is my guess, rather than it creating some kind of a runaway thing. I think now in the future, the internet is going to get overlaid on the physical world. So it’s not like we have the physical world and now I have all my digital stuff through this tiny little window. In the future, it’ll be, okay, all my attention goes to the world. The world consists of physical things and virtual things that are overlaid on it. I think in the future, we’ll have AI co-workers.

They’re not even people. They wouldn’t be able to be embodied. So if you’re having a physical meeting, you’re sitting around with a bunch of people, they couldn’t show up as part of the team no matter what. But I think we’ll get to a point where just like your friend can show up in a hologram and like your AI colleagues will be able to also. So I think like most of the world will be physical. There will be this increasing amount of like virtual objects or people who are kind of beaming in or like hologramming into different things to interact in different ways.

And I actually think that natural blending of the kind of digital world and the physical is way more natural than the segmentation that we have today where it’s like you’re in the physical world and now I’m just going to go tune it out to look at my, like I’m going to access the whole digital universe through this like five inch screen. I don’t think that there’s going to be like one AI. I certainly don’t think that there should be one company that controls AI. I think like with anything on the internet, a lot of it is just going to be funny and like fun and content and people are going to create agents that are like, like AIs that are entertaining and they’ll pass them around almost like content where it’s like just like you pass around like a reel or a video and you’re like, this thing is fun.

Like in the future, like a video, it’s not interactive. You know, you watch it and you’re consuming it, but I think a lot of more entertainment in the future will be inherently interactive where someone will kind of sculpt an experience or an AI and then they’ll show someone it’s like, oh, this is funny, but like it’s not necessarily that I’m going to interact with that AI every day. It’s like, okay, it’s funny for five minutes and then you pass it along to your friend. Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.

And once you have that, then in the beginning, it will be really expensive to run, then you can get it to be more efficient. And then over time, we’ll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers. But I don’t know. I think that that’ll augment the people working on it. So my view on this is like the future, people are just going to be so much more creative and they’re going to be freed up to do kind of crazy things.

I think these systems will get even better if they’re supplemented by some real-world data like collected by an acting robot or even potentially in very realistic simulations where you have avatars that act in the world too. That’s what will unlock robotics. I think that’s also what will then allow this notion of a universal assistant that can help you in your daily life across both the digital world and the real world. That’s the thing we’re missing. If everything becomes more agent-based, then I think we’re going to want our assistants and our agents to do a lot of the work and a lot of the mundane work.

So I think that we’re going to end up with probably a kind of economics model where agents talk to other agents and negotiate things between themselves and then give you back the results. And you’ll have the service providers with agents as well that are offering services and maybe there’s some bidding and cost and things like that involved and efficiency. And then I hope from the user perspective, you have this assistant that’s super capable that you can just like a brilliant human assistant, personal assistant and can take care of a lot of the mundane things for you.

And I think if you follow that through, that does imply a lot of changes to the structure of the web. And that’s the next big step actually for agent-based systems is to go beyond world models. Can you collect enough data where the agents are also acting in the world and making plans and achieving tasks? I expect that in 2025, we will have systems that people look at, even people who are skeptical of current progress and say, wow, I did not expect that. Agents are the thing everyone is talking about, I think for good reason.

You know, this idea that you can give an AI system a pretty complicated task, like a kind of task being given to a very smart human that takes a while to go off and do and use a bunch of tools and create something of value. That’s the kind of thing I’d expect next year, and that’s like a huge deal. [tr:trw].