Top of Mind with Brad Porter
He built Amazon’s robot army. Then walked away. Why? To build something bigger. Top of Mind is a weekly 2–5 minute audio drop from Brad Porter—former Amazon VP of Robotics, Scale AI CTO, and now founder of Cobot. Each short episode delivers raw, unfiltered insights on leadership, automation, and the chaos of building at the edge of physical AI. From warehouse floors to the frontier of machine intelligence, this is what it sounds like when a Silicon Valley leader thinks out loud.
Top of Mind with Brad Porter
A Robotically-Enabled Abundant Future
Today's "Top of Mind" discusses our abundant future. This is a topic Vinod Khosla spoke about that I've also been thinking about a lot. In today's world in developed countries, most of us do not need to worry about raising our own food. Yet in the late 1700's over 76% of society worked in agriculture. AI and robotics are going to eliminate much of the work we do every day.
I also discuss Amazon's step function jump with their reported 25% productivity and 25% speed improvement at their new SHV1 facility. This is a massive jump. I suspect Amazon is not that many years away from fully automating receiving, stowing, picking, packing and shipping your items... and then delivering it to you by drone. Imagine a future where no human every touches an item you order? That future is coming sooner than we realize.
(Recorded in March, 2025)
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