Physical AIFollows Aviation’s Flight Plan

Most people who fly can’t tell you how many engines were on the plane. Nowadays nobody needs to. But for decades, that was the most important question in aviation. It decided which routes an aircraft could fly and whether a new design lived or died. That is what a mature industry looks like: The questions that once decided everything have been answered so thoroughly that they disappeared. Physical AI—machines that move things through the real world, from self-driving trucks to warehouse or household robots—sits at the other end of that arc. Its life-or-death questions are all still open. I build self-driving trucks, the first of these machines to run at commercial scale. So I stare at this list every day, again and again: the same four questions aviation answered. Can it work safely? Can it make money? Will the rules allow it? Who pays for the growth? These questions must be answered many, many times, before physical AI lives up to the promise that so many are evangelizing. THE ATLANTIC FLIGHT To tell the future, one must be a student of the past. In June of 1919, two Englishmen took off from Newfoundland in a converted World War I bomber and 16 hours later, landed nose-down in an…