Did you hear about the Tesla bot? Let me tell you about the new announcement by Elon Musk regarding the Tesla bot.
Do you recall that strange robot movie starring Will Smith?
Did You Hear About The Tesla bot?
We don’t either, yep. Elon Musk however does. Tesla is working on a 5’8″ Tesla Bot, and a prototype should actually be ready by the end of this year. The announcement was made during Tesla’s first-ever AI Day, which was broadcast online Thursday evening. The company is working on neural networks and its powerful Dojo supercomputer are shown as bot uses that have nothing to do with cars.
In essence, Musk said, “If you think about what we’re doing with cars right now, Tesla is probably the biggest robotics company in this era because our cars are kind of like semi-sentient robots on wheels.” With the Full Self-Driving Computer, Dojo, and all of the neural nets that recognize their surroundings and learn how to navigate them, it seems logical to place them on a humanoid shape.
According to him, the bot is “designed to be nice and traverse a world built for humans.” He added that they are designing it so that people may easily escape from it and defeat it. It will have a walking speed of 5 miles per hour, weigh 125 pounds, and feature a screen on its face that shows crucial information.
It’s interesting to note that Musk envisions this as replacing most of the mundane duties that currently take up so many people’s time, such as grocery shopping and other daily activities. He waxed poetic about a time when choosing to forgo physical labour and all the economic ramifications that would follow.
In the long run, I do believe that universal basic income is necessary, according to Musk. But not at the moment because the robot is broken.
Engineers are welcome to “join our team and help us develop this,” Musk said.
Just keep in mind that Tesla is not the only automaker—or even business—to build humanoid robots. The Asimo robot from Honda has been around for many years and is very sophisticated. Why are we so excited about Tesla’s robots when Toyota and GM also have their own? Is it just Tesla, that’s why? Or is it as a result of this upcoming, perhaps extremely powerful vision-based supercomputer?
Who knows if anything like this humanoid robot will ever exist, but until we can buy one of these robots in a store and bring it home to buy our eggs for us, we’ll keep up with Tesla updates. That is an AI utopia, indeed.
