On Friday, 20 August Elon Musk’s Tesla hosted and streamed its “AI Day”, an event that might have attracted little attention beyond industry insiders who would be interested in the software developments behind Tesla’s cars. In fact, Musk tweeted: “Convincing the best AI talent to join Tesla is the sole goal” of AI Day. However, towards the end of the presentation, Musk unveiled the Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot concept under the working name Optimus, and effectively made sure that what was essentially an esoteric event would make headlines and score Tesla yet another wave of publicity.

After a short teaser video, featuring 3D-rendered close-ups of the human-shaped robot, a human dancer robotically walked on stage in a white spandex costume that resembled the Tesla Bot, before breaking into a jig. Musk quipped that unlike the dancer, the Tesla Bot “will be real”, promising that Tesla will probably have a prototype “some time” in 2022.

“Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company [because] our cars are like semi-sentient robots on wheels. It kind of makes sense to put that on to a humanoid form,” he told the audience. 

Standing just above 1.7m tall and weighing 56.7kg, the robot is intended to be friendly, navigate through a world built for humans and eliminate repetitive and boring tasks, said Musk.

Terminator or nah?

“You can run away from it, and most likely overpower it,” Musk joked. “Five miles an hour… if you can run faster than that you’ll be fine.” The bot will have a carry capacity of 20.4kg and it will be able to deadlift up to 68kg. Its face will be a screen “for useful information”. It will also feature eight cameras.  

In terms of imagined real-world use, Musk says: “Can you talk to it and say, ‘Please pick up that bolt and attach it to a car with that wrench’? It should be able to do that. It should be able to… please go to the store and get me the following groceries… that kind of thing… so yeah… I think we can do that.”

Acknowledging the potential impact of such a robot on certain jobs, Musk said, “That’s why in the long term I think there will need to be universal basic income… essentially, in the future physical work will be choice… if you wanna do it you can, but you won’t need to do it.”

Image: Tesla

Is it a real thing? 

Or is it a marketing exercise? Next-level trolling? Those in the know, know. Some tech enthusiasts believe it is little more than a marketing exercise unlikely to be realised any time soon. Especially considering that companies that have been at the cutting edge of robotics innovation for the past decade, such as Boston Dynamics, are clear that when it comes to bipedal robots, they are still very much at a research stage. 

Atlas, the name given to Boston Dynamics’ impressive bipedal prototype, is described by the company as “a research platform designed to push the limits of whole-body mobility”. And although Atlas is acknowledged as the most advanced humanoid of its kind, Boston Dynamics is yet to promise a date for commercial use.

Multi award-winning tech reviewer Marques Brownlee, who has had the privilege of being granted a private tour of the Tesla factory by Musk himself, as well as a sit-down interview, had this to say about the Tesla Bot: “If you want to make a robot to take over a task, you typically don’t want to build it like a human. You want to build it for a single task and make it as efficient as possible at that task.

“The ideal way to make a robot vacuum the floor for you, is not to build a human-size shaped robot that pushes around a vacuum; it’s to make a robot the vacuum; the vacuum is the robot. You don’t want a humanoid robot standing at the sink washing dishes for you, the dishwasher is the robot. Tesla knows this; you don’t have a humanoid-shaped robot sitting in your car driving the car for you, the car is the robot, the self-driving car that drives itself has already been done. So the list of things that you’d want a human-shaped robot for is pretty small, because labour is typically not designed around the human form.”

James Vincent, a senior tech reporter at The Verge, penned an article titled: “Don’t overthink it: Elon Musk’s Tesla Bot is a joke. A distraction and an empty promise”. 

He writes: “This sort of bait-and-switch is often how Musk operates. Just think about how his plans for the Hyperloop changed over time. The technology was announced as a railgun-like train system that would move people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than half an hour. Over the years, these ambitions have shrunk until the project morphed into The Loop: a small tunnel that you can drive a car through, if you want. (Otherwise known as: a tunnel.)”

Recalling Sophia, the humanoid robot that made headlines in 2017 and 2018, appearing on magazine covers, chat shows, including an interview on Carte Blanche, as well as addressing the United Nations, Vincent remarks: “Sophia relies on misdirection to fool audiences and is a regular target of AI experts’ scorn. But it also has a job to do. 

“As one of the robot’s creators, Ben Goertzel, told me in 2017, Sophia works by priming our imagination, encouraging us to fool ourselves into thinking the future is closer than the evidence suggests. In the process, the robot generates funding and news coverage for its makers. [Musk]’s twist on the Sophia strategy is that he doesn’t even need a simulacrum of a robot to sell the dream. All he needs is a dancer in a spandex suit. Now that’s innovation.” DM/ML