The Robotics Revolution

47 snips

Sep 12, 2025

Ryan Julian, a research scientist in embodied AI, shares insights from his background at DeepMind and his expertise in robotics. He dives into what truly defines a robot and the challenges of robotics today. Ryan highlights the transformative potential of robotic foundation models and the importance of human-robot collaboration over full labor replacement. The conversation touches on China's advancements in robotics, emphasizing their unique strategies compared to American firms. Finally, Ryan discusses how quickly we might see robots revolutionizing manufacturing.

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INSIGHT

Robots As Ultimate Capital Goods

Robots multiply human labor and act as the ultimate capital good for productivity increases.
Advanced robots could transform low-productivity sectors like domestic care and maintenance.

INSIGHT

Physics Makes Robotics Hard

Robotics is hard because physics makes failures irreversible and varied across environments.
Robots must sense, reason, and act under irreversible physical constraints unlike digital systems.

ADVICE

Keep Safety-Critical Control Local

Keep fast, safety-critical control on-board the robot to meet tight real-time deadlines.
Offload only higher-level reasoning to the cloud when latency budgets (≈1s) allow.

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Ryan Julian is a research scientist in embodied AI. He worked on large-scale robotics foundation models at DeepMind and got his PhD in machine learning at USC in 2021. Follow him on X: @ryancjulian

In our conversation today, we discuss…

What makes a robot a robot, and what makes robotics so difficult,
The promise of robotic foundation models and strategies to overcome the data bottleneck,
Why full labor replacement is far less likely than human-robot synergy,
China’s top players in the robotic industry, and what sets them apart from American companies and research institutions,
How robots will impact manufacturing, and how quickly we can expect to see robotics take off.

O*NET’s ontology of labor: http://onetcenter.org/database.html

ChinaTalk's Unitree coverage: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/unitree-ceo-on-chinas-robot-revolution

Robotics reading recommendations: Chris Paxton, Ted Xiao, C Zhang, and The Humanoid Hub on X. You can also check out the General Robots and Learning and Control Substacks, Vincent Vanhoucke on Medium, and IEEE’s robotics coverage.

Today’s podcast is brought to you by 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit that helps people find fulfilling careers that do good. 80,000 Hours — named for the average length of a career — has been doing in-depth research on AI issues for over a decade, producing reports on how the US and China can manage existential risk, scenarios for potential AI catastrophe, and examining the concrete steps you can take to help ensure AI development goes well.

Their research suggests that working to reduce risks from advanced AI could be one of the most impactful ways to make a positive difference in the world.

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To read their report about AI coordination between the US and China, visit http://80000hours.org/chinatalkcoord.

Outro music: Daft Punk - Motherboard (⁠YouTube Link⁠)

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