By Delaney Newhouse | Focus Editor
Baylor Angel Network hosted speakers at the Paul L. Foster Campus for Business and Innovation on Thursday to discuss the potential of investing in humanoid robotic technology and cryptocurrencies.
Members of the network, which seeks to invest in early-stage startups, joined students and faculty to hear about the future of the economy from two different but optimistic perspectives.
Chris Camillo, a former researcher for the BAN and current social arbitrage investor, spoke about companies developing autonomous robots to have sources of infinite labor. Camillo said that these developments would not only combat a future labor shortage but transform the economy by redefining work.
“What’s happening right now with specifically embodied AI and humanoid robots is the biggest thing of our lifetime and maybe in the history of this country,” Camillo said. “Most of what we do today as jobs, people 75, 80 years ago would not agree is a job. … What will become a job in 2050, we will laugh at.”
Camillo said Austin company Aptronix as the one he believed was closest to developing the necessary technologies to fully automate many menial tasks. Aptronix is among the companies racing to finish developing the necessary actuator –– energy conversion –– technology, sensors and coordination between robot limbs these projects would require.
If Camillo’s prediction of a labor shortage of anywhere from 50 to 350 million people by 2030 is correct, then any alternate source of labor could be essential to maintaining the nation’s GDP. However, these robots incorporating AI may not come as soon as some investors hope.
Self-driving cars, another promised technology from the automation industry, have consistently failed to meet the industry’s reported standards. In 2015, Tesla company owner Elon Musk is clipped in an interview with Danish news publication Børsen saying self-driving vehicles would soon be available to purchase.
As of yet, they are not.
The second speaker, Devin Baker, a crypto fund owner, focused far less on the applications of AI and focused more on the world of cryptocurrency. Only weeks out from a shocking cryptocurrency scandal when the Hawk Tuah coin collapsed the day of its launch on the Solana blockchain, Baker assured his audience that cryptocurrency was a safe investment.
“People often think that crypto people just want this chaotic wild west of a world forever and always,” Baker said. “That’s actually not true. You take the temperature of the crypto space and they just want to know how they can build what they want to build and do it legally.”
After discussing the benefits of cryptocurrency investment, such as a fully liquid portfolio, decentralized currency and collective ownership of blockchain platforms, Baker quoted Marc Andreessen’s famous Techno-Optimist Manifesto.
“My favorite line of the entire piece was he said, ‘A techno optimist holds the belief that every next problem is solvable,’” Baker said. “So you innovate, you create, you push the frontier, you go to the edge, problems pop up. Let’s keep going and keep working on it.”
