With the advancement of robotics and AI technologies in the past decade, we
have now entered the age of autonomous machines. In this new age of information
technology, autonomous machines, such as service robots, autonomous drones,
delivery robots, and autonomous vehicles, rather than humans, will provide
services. In this article, through examining the technical challenges and
economic impact of the digital economy, we argue that scalability is both
highly necessary from a technical perspective and significantly advantageous
from an economic perspective, thus is the key for the autonomy industry to
achieve its full potential. Nonetheless, the current development paradigm,
dubbed Autonomy 1.0, scales with the number of engineers, instead of with the
amount of data or compute resources, hence preventing the autonomy industry to
fully benefit from the economies of scale, especially the exponentially
cheapening compute cost and the explosion of available data. We further analyze
the key scalability blockers and explain how a new development paradigm, dubbed
Autonomy 2.0, can address these problems to greatly boost the autonomy
industry.

在信息技术的新时代中，自主机器成为实现其全部潜力的关键，该文章通过研究数字经济的技术挑战和经济影响，指出规模可扩展性从技术和经济角度非常重要，并且对于自主工业实现其全部潜力具有重要优势，然而，当前的发展范式限制了经济规模的优势，通过分析可扩展性阻碍和提出一个新的开发范式，命名为自主 2.0，这将加速自主工业的发展。