The Iferia Techcast
00:25:51 · Adam Sand
So you have to make people believe in that. You have to create smart, intelligent belief systems and have a vision that people believe in. The other part of it is that you have to show people that you're doing it in a human centric way. Because it's not like the robot's going take your job. It's that all of a sudden you like... It used to be that to dig a hole in the ground, you needed 30 people to dig the hole. Now you need two people. You need one guy to spot the hole and the other guy to be in the machine digging the hole. So what did... What have we become? Heavy equipment operators. Heavy equipment operators make more money than 30 dudes with a shovel. So you're moving roofers from being manual laborers that are doing a grunt work job that nobody wants to do, that's unsafe, that drains you of energy, that takes time and energy away from what you could invest into your family and being there for your sons and daughters and coming home with energy. Like roofers go home, bagged, tired, exhausted, hurt. Well, if you go to work and you're operating and assisting a robot crew that's doing 90% of the hard work and you just get to do the craftsman work. The stuff that the robot can't do in the tight spaces, the detail work. Right? If you're setting up the robot crew, if you're tearing down the robot crew, if you're packaging up the robot crew, if you're hooking up the robot crew for the safety equipment. That stuff is where now all of a sudden you have 30 guys on five crews, right? Or six crews. Well now you can have 30 guys which operate on 15 crews. And now the roofing company is more successful. The roofer is paid more money. And they're also going home with a feeling like their job is respected and that then they go home with energy so they can play with their son. They can play with their daughter. They can enjoy time with their wife. So you... You're not just giving them stakes in the future, but you're also creating a better future.
00:27:51 · Ezekiel Iferia
[00:27:51] S0: Absolutely. That was very insightful. So you talk about putting robots on a roof. So what's actually real? What's feasible in the next three to five years, you know, versus what's... What should we see as purely sci fi? And also last, what should a roofing owner or roofer do about it right now?
00:28:11 · Adam Sand
[00:28:11] S1: Yeah. So you you wanna look at what is happening at a scale bigger than you. So everybody kind of heard about Elon Musk as a trillionaire because of all these big mergers where he rolled his companies up. Right? And he's not a trillionaire yet. He has the ability to purchase shares. He has options that will be distributed to him if he accomplishes certain things. One of those things that he has to accomplish is putting a million robots into the market. So a million people or a million companies or companies have to buy a million robots and that unlocks some of his shares. So then he could then sell them and have the money. So he's not the only guy doing it. China is further ahead by volume. And there's like Boston Dynamics and DJI and Figure and so many more. So they're like, you you have to look and say, okay, the world is creating robots, and most of them are creating humanoid robots. The world is mostly built around humans, right? There's a reason why a train is the size of a train. It's because it's about the same width as a horse and buggy was. And then if you look at a car, it's same units of of measurement. Like, why don't we sit three wide in a car or four wide in a car? It makes sense because it's the same size that the train was, the same size the horse and buggy was. It's roughly the same size. So the world, the door handles, the desks, the cupboards, everything in the world is built to work around humans. So the robots that do most of this are probably going to be platforms that you insert training material into. Right? You take a computer or phone and you put an app inside of it. So, you know, you take a Super Nintendo or a PlayStation. You put a cartridge or a disc inside of it. You put the thing in it to turn it in. So as hardware and software become kind of ubiquitous and almost merging, these platforms will be where you put a training set into them. And so that's how you keep it from being sci fi. You you have a bunch of companies racing to make the best, most capable humanoid robots that can just function in a world that exists and was designed for people where everything is like, there's a handle. It's here. It's where your hand is. So largely you'll see humanoid robotics and then you might see efficiencies made for things that might fit the job a little better.
00:30:34 · Adam Sand
Like does the robot's going to be on its knees most of the day when it's a roofer? So do you split the roofing installation portion into a robot that just doesn't need a knee? Right? Like that will probably be a part of it. But then you asked it... So like to determine the difference between sci fi, you just have to think that a humanoid robot is like a PlayStation or a phone or a computer. Like everybody has the same computer, but does vastly different things with it. So everybody can have humanoid robot, but will do vastly different things with it. Some, just like people, you might have a bulkier one, a bigger one, and that's probably going to be the Tesla five C for construction. And then you're going to have a daintier one and a smaller one, a lighter one. And that might be the one that helps you pick out the right shirt at a clothing store or something. Right? So it's gonna be... There's gonna be different models, but more or less similar platforms. Just like you have a MacBook Pro and you have a MacBook Air. Right? You're gonna have a bigger one that is in a lighter one. Now, the second part of your question was what should a roofing company owner do? Well, I understand the resistance to change. I understand if you don't like this future. I myself am very concerned about this future. I wrote a 30 page AI manifesto about how I feel about all this and where I think and what I would just say to anybody is that this future is probably coming whether we like it or not because we have a zero to a billion track record of putting technology back in a bottle. If technology makes life easier and increases the capacity of human beings to do more, it survives. Every single time. Cars were easier than horses. Phones were easier than sending mail on horse and horse carriers. Right? Emails were easier than sending letters. Video calls are better at consuming information than a book. Right? So technology, we don't put technology back in the bottle very well as humans. And that's something that's really hard to wrestle with because chain, this kind, this level of revolution is very uncomfortable. Knowing that we're probably not going to stop it because of our own laziness, self interest, right, and desire for convenience, then we have to say, how can I align myself best to the future?
00:32:57 · Adam Sand
And the way that you can align yourself best to the future is to try and find an organization to align with that shares your same morals and values, that you believe is gonna do things in a human centric way, if that's what you want. If you wanna be an evil overlord and create a bunch of evil robots to take over the world, then I probably ain't your guy. Right? But, like, if you want to do this in a human centric way that has a distributed gain for everybody who contributes to it in a meritocracy style of of deployment, then, like, maybe we're an organization to align with. If you want to sell your roofing company, take $5,000,000 and move to a tiny little country and take people on fishing boat tours, like then sell to private equity and like get out of here. Right? Go to a place where it'll probably come last. You know what I mean? But if you're gonna live in like the West, right, or you're gonna live in China, you're gonna live in like, you know, certain places in the world where it'll just make economic sense to use robots and autonomy, you probably wanna find a way to align yourself in the most probable way that you will be able to continue to support your team and your family so that you can just be a part of the new world. Because if you look through history, the people who have resisted it, the people who have been like a bastion against progress, they typically go down for being fighters, but they go they go... They're also forgotten. And if you look at a story like the Luddite fantasy or fallacy, right, there's two perspectives on this. The Luddites were people who bashed up these machines because it... These machines made it easier to do the job, and it was taking away their job. So they smashed up these machines thinking that all the jobs would go away. Right? And in the end, they were wrong, but it did take a generation. But it took it... Why did it take a generation? Because of resistance to change. But the people who supported the progress, they created generational wealth. They they they did something to change their family trees. And this has happened so many times throughout history in that you look at Coca Cola. Right? They were taking a lot of bad press because what do they do? They suck the water out of rivers all over the world and make entire communities dry. And some people hate them for it. So what did they do?
00:35:24 · Adam Sand
They found a technology. Right? And this technology ran on bike parts. Like the... You could... There's a piece of technology, but the rest of it ran on used bike parts. Like, you could make this thing run on on junk that you found anywhere. And you could put one end of this tube into water, into... In any kind of water, and the water that came out the other end was safe enough to be injected into your body. So it's this water cleaning machine. Right? And they deployed these all across, like, these communities that had been displaced by Coca Cola's water efforts sucking rivers dry to make Coca Cola for people in in Boston. Well, the community, right, they found that that these machines kept getting smashed up and broken. And who was doing it? And this... Again, this is just history. Right? It was the women. And because the women typically went to the river to get these jugs of water that they put on their shoulder and carry back to the community. Right? Well, they... This was the one time during the day that they would be able to get away, to just go out and enjoy themselves. It was like women going to the mall, but they were going to get the water. And this machine made it so they didn't have to it. So they... The women smashed up the machines. It was cleaner, better water that didn't require going and walking a mile. You didn't have to carry a clay pot on your head. And they still smashed these machines up, and Coca Cola put, like, $500,000,000 See this over and over and over again throughout history. Right? But the communities that rallied around, okay, we have a water source. We have a water source now that can take not clean water and turn it into clean water. If we can build a community around this water source instead of some river that is now dry, and rather than complaining about the fact that the river is dry now and protesting and fighting it, let's just move our community. And I get I get the cultural issues. I understand and have empathy for that. But the world needs to just get more efficient all the time. Unless you like Thanos snap half the world away, we have to find ways to coexist better. Right? And so to coexist better, we have to become efficient. And then there will be gains in efficiency provided by technology. And if we rally around those things, generally, we're left with a better world. That it's not perfect, and it never will be.