Look at all the stuff people do. Almost none of it is automated via software. Look at people on construcion sites, cashiers, cleaning stuff, cab drivers ... all of it is done manually. I am writing this manually, even though I would prefer to just say it while doing the dishes. But there is no good voice interface for browsers yet. And hey, why do I even do the dishes?
I would say we haven't even started automating the world via software.
10 years of 30% growth just means we will spend 14x more on software in 10 years than we do now. Considering we have not even really started using software for automating work, I would be surprised if we stay below that.
I would think that no matter what the percentage of AI in the revenue is - mankind keeps automating their work via software. And so far, we automated only very little. We probably can keep increasing it at 30% pa for 10 years. That would mean we just automate 14x more than we do now. In 10 years, that seems not even fast to me.
Do I understand your logic correctly that after 14 years of 30% growth another year is extremely unlikely and after 14.99 years it is almost impossible?
My logic is that we only have to take the next 10 years into account when calculating the probability.
And lots of things grew 30% or more for 10 years.
Bitcoin's market cap grew over 70% pa for 10 over years now.
Amazon's revenue grew over 60% pa for over 10 years in their early days.
I can think of many numbers, but would have to check: global solar installations, smartphone usage are examples that come to mind.
According to Perplexity because instead of going through 20 earnings reports myself, I outsourced the task to Perplexity and then manually checked a few of the numbers to be reasonably sure they were correct.
The amount of data grows exponential. Not only do the existing Teslas keep adding data, but more and more Teslas are added to the fleet, accelerating the pace at which data is generated.
Crunching the numbers gets exponentially faster, because compute power is growing exponentially.
The algorithms used to crunch the data become better.
As more and more revenue comes in, more and more can be spent on data crunching.
The sensors become better.
Maps become better.
All of these factors multiply. Adding another exponential force. Even if the data would grow at a linear pace and the algorithms would get better at a linear pace, this would result in exponential improvements, as these two factors multiply.
So the "argument" you give is your gut feeling when you look at how things are now.
I expected something like this. That's why I said "quantifiable". We humans are animals of habit and have a hard time imagining a changing world. But every time a few decades pass, we look back and see - damn! - a lot has changed.
A way to get away from feeling and towards a rational prediction is to look at rate of change. In my experience, doubling the performance of a new technology (self-driving is only 13 years old) is usually doable. And that means 1000x improvement in 10 years. And from where we are now, that gives us Waymo in every major city and Tesla with super human capabilities.
Any quantifiable arguments that 10-20 years is aggressive?
Google started development 13 years ago and now already has fully autonomous taxis on the road in a 4 cities. If they double the number of cities every year, in 10 years they will be in over 4000 cities.
Tesla started around the same time. Looking at videos of tesla in self driving mode, my feeling is that without human interaction, it would crash maybe once every 50 hours of driving. Double that every year and in 10 years it will crash once every 50000 hours. A human driver, driving 1 hour a day, would need 136 years of crash free driving to achieve that. But the average driver has 4 accidents in their lifetime. So we are already in superhuman territory by then.
If we had to dial every number we want to call manually, physical buttons on phones would outperform touchscreens too. But nobody does that anymore. And it is nicer to select the name of a friend on a touchscreen than to type it with physical keys.
Same goes for cars. Humans spending their time keeping the car in lane, stopping at red lights, starting when the light turns green, doing turns etc will phase out more and more over the next 10, 20 years.
The interaction we still want to have with a car is probably nicer on a touchscreen. Especially when you are not dabbling with a steering wheel anymore.
Stuff like seeing the route on a map, selecting waypoints etc. We would not want physical keys for that when we are at home at our computer, right? I think dedicated keys are just legacy from the "I'm busy with the steering wheel and need to do other stuff blindly" area.
Much of it will probably also move to voice control.
9*$50B = $450B yearly revenue.
What could be the margin Alphabet makes from that? Last quarter, Alphabet had $100B revenue and $35B net income. So 35% margin.
$450Bx0.35 = $158B
What is $158B in annual profit worth? Currently Alphabet's p/e is about 30. If we take that, it would be $158Bx30 = $4740B. So around $5T.
If we are heading towards the creation of $5T in value via cloud revenue, investing $100B per year to build it seems not particularly high to me.