Autonomy 2.0: The Quest for Economies of Scale

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of scalability in autonomous machines and proposes a new development paradigm, Autonomy 2.0, to overcome current limitations and fully leverage economies of scale in the industry.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of Autonomy 2.0, a new paradigm that enhances scalability by shifting focus from engineering effort to data and compute resources.

Findings

Current paradigm scales with engineers, limiting growth.

Autonomy 2.0 addresses scalability blockers.

Enhanced scalability can unlock full industry potential.

Abstract

With the advancement of robotics and AI technologies in the past decade, we have now entered the age of autonomous machines. In this new age of information technology, autonomous machines, such as service robots, autonomous drones, delivery robots, and autonomous vehicles, rather than humans, will provide services. In this article, through examining the technical challenges and economic impact of the digital economy, we argue that scalability is both highly necessary from a technical perspective and significantly advantageous from an economic perspective, thus is the key for the autonomy industry to achieve its full potential. Nonetheless, the current development paradigm, dubbed Autonomy 1.0, scales with the number of engineers, instead of with the amount of data or compute resources, hence preventing the autonomy industry to fully benefit from the economies of scale, especially the exponentially cheapening compute cost and the explosion of available data. We further analyze the key scalability blockers and explain how a new development paradigm, dubbed Autonomy 2.0, can address these problems to greatly boost the autonomy industry.