The Rise of the Machine: The Next Evolution of AI Is Physical

The Rise of the Machine: The Next Evolution of AI Is PhysicalBy Steven Muskal, Ph.D.For the past few years, the story of AI has been a story about language. I am convinced that is only the first act. The next major evolution of AI is not happening on a screen. It is happening in the physical world. The machine is learning to move.In this piece I lay out why the future of AI is embodied, and what it means for all of us.Two bets on intelligence. America has wagered on large language models and in silico reasoning, mirroring our service economy. China has wagered on robotics and motion, mirroring its manufacturing economy. It is an arms race, but neither bet wins alone. We will have to bring the two halves together, with proper guardrails.Dexterity built the brain. Nature solved this long ago. It was not the opposable thumb that let us play the piano. It was the brain that grew to drive it. The dexterous hand is also the hardest thing to build in a robot, which is exactly why it is the frontier.The hardest problem in sports. A 100 mph fastball leaves almost no time to react. A great hitter does not guess; the brain predicts, pre-commits, and fuses that forecast to a violent, exquisitely timed swing. Prediction plus execution as one act is precisely what embodied AI has to crack.The machine is already moving. Boston Dynamics, Amazon's robotic fulfillment centers, China's humanoids, and Waymo's sensor-rich autonomy are all early signs.The next frontier is lightness. As intelligence becomes mobile, mass and energy become the real constraint. Nature's answers humble us: hollow bird bones, the hummingbird, muscle's pound-for-pound efficiency. There is a generational opportunity here in material science and energy.Freed, not just displaced. Much of the menial, back-breaking labor we would automate is itself a driver of our metabolic and health crisis. Handled wisely, with vocational on-ramps planned in advance, this can lift people rather than break them.The machine is rising. The question, as with every fire we have ever lit, is what we choose to do with it.Read the full essay at stevenmuskal.com and on Substack at drstevenmuskal.com.Steven Muskal, Ph.D. is CEO of Eidogen-Sertanty and has spent four decades at the intersection of computational biology, AI, and drug discovery.