  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.
