The Technology That Changed Everything

In September 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly looked down from the International Space Station and tweeted a photo of the Korean Peninsula at night. South Korea blazed with light. China blazed with light. Between them, North Korea was a black hole. Kelly wrote: "Feel bad for the people of #NorthKorea when I see with my own eyes they live without electricity."

NASA's description of the image was clinical but brutal: the darkened country "appears as if it were a patch of water joining the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan." Twenty-six million people, invisible from orbit. Not because they are hiding. Because they do not have electricity.

Electricity is the only technology whose presence or absence you can see from space. It is also the only technology in history that changed every domain of human life simultaneously. The subtitle of this book claims humanoid robots will "change everything." Before examining how, we need to be precise about what that means.

Technologies That Changed a Lot#

The printing press, the steam engine, the automobile, the internet. Each was transformative. None changed everything.

The printing press operated in the domain of information. The steam engine was too large and dangerous to leave the factory. The automobile moved people and goods but did not change what happened once they arrived. The internet collapsed communication and commerce but moves data, not matter. It cannot lift a patient from a bed, harvest a field, or build a wall.

Electricity#

In 1882, Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan began delivering electricity to 59 customers. Most Americans had never seen an electric light.

Forty years later, 70 percent of American homes had electricity. By 1945, 90 percent. A person born in rural Alabama in 1900 grew up reading by kerosene lamp and hauling water by hand. By age 45, their home could have electric lights, a refrigerator, a radio, and running water pumped by an electric motor.

In 2000, the National Academy of Engineering ranked the greatest engineering achievements of the twentieth century. Electrification came first. Not the automobile (second), not the airplane (third), not the computer (eighth) or the internet (thirteenth). Neil Armstrong announced the results. The criterion: which achievements contributed most to quality of life?

What made electricity different was that it was not a tool. It was a medium for delivering energy that could be converted into light, heat, motion, sound, or computation. A single wire could power a lamp, a motor, a heater, a radio, a surgical instrument. Coal could heat things and drive pistons. Oil could fuel engines. Neither could do everything.

Before electrification, every factory was organized around a central steam engine connected to shafts, belts, and pulleys. Machines had to sit near the main shaft. When the engine broke, the whole factory stopped. Electric motors changed this. Each machine got its own motor. Factories could be arranged by workflow instead of proximity to a power source. Henry Ford's assembly line, usually credited to the automobile, was made possible by electricity. Without individually powered stations, there is no moving assembly line.

A farm wife in the 1920s hauled water, scrubbed laundry by hand, and spent a full day every week on washing alone. The electric washing machine, the refrigerator, the iron, and the stove did not just make housework easier. They made it fast enough that women entered the workforce in numbers that would have been impossible without them. The electric motor in a washing machine is a precondition for the two-income household.

Before electrification, hospitals relied on natural light and handheld instruments. The electrocardiogram, the X-ray machine, the defibrillator, the ventilator, the MRI: every one depends on electricity.

The telegraph, the telephone, the radio, television, the internet: every leap in human communication has been electrical. Refrigeration transformed the human diet and made the global food supply chain possible. Elevators made skyscrapers possible. Air conditioning made Houston, Phoenix, Dubai, and Singapore habitable at their current scale. Radar was arguably the decisive technological advantage of the Allied forces in World War II.

And the simplest change: the light bulb ended the tyranny of the sun. For all of human history, productive activity stopped at dark. Electric light meant factories could run three shifts. Shops could stay open. People could read after sunset. The entire economy of the evening exists because of a filament in a glass bulb.

The printing press changed what people knew. The automobile changed where people went. The internet changed how people communicated. Electricity changed what people did, where they lived, how they worked, what they ate, how they healed, how they fought, and when they slept. That is why you can see it from space.

The Case for a Second#

In the 143 years since Pearl Street Station, no technology has matched electricity's reach.

The claim of this book is that humanoid robots are the first technology since electricity with the potential to operate across every domain of physical human activity. Not because they use AI, though they do. But because they replicate the one thing that has limited the reach of every machine ever built: the human body.

Every previous machine was designed for a specific environment and task. A tractor works in a field. A robotic arm works on a factory floor. A dishwasher works in a kitchen. Powerful in their domain, useless outside it. The human body is a general-purpose physical platform. It walks on any surface, fits through any doorway, and its hands can grip a wrench, cradle an infant, type on a keyboard, and pick a tomato.

A humanoid robot inherits this. The same platform walks into a warehouse, a hospital, a kitchen, a construction site, a farm, or a battlefield. Same doors, same tools, same spaces.

Electricity was a general-purpose way to deliver energy. Humanoid robots are a general-purpose way to deliver labor. The chapters that follow map what happens when that second input gets the same treatment the first one did, domain by domain. Electricity took about forty years. We may be at the beginning of the next forty.