On August 19th Tesla hosted “AI Day,” which came with a spate of details about the company’s innovative technology for their vehicles—and an AI robot.
Dubbed Tesla Bot, its purpose will be to eliminate tasks that are considered “dangerous, repetitive and boring” such as using a wrench to fix a car part, according to CEO Elon Musk. The technology behind Tesla Bot is reportedly derived from the same mechanics powering its vehicles.
“It makes sense to put that onto humanoid form,” Musk said. “This, I think, will be quite profound. Essentially, in the future, physical work will be a choice. If you want to do it, you can, but you won’t need to do it.”
Elon Musk.
Tesla Bot was announced after executives detailed the bells and whistles of the upgrades to Tesla vehicles and the Dojo supercomputer, which will be used to train its neural net. But like most things Tesla and Musk, viewers were introduced to the bot in awkward fashion: by someone in a monochrome jumpsuit flailing to electronic dance music like a fish out of water.
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The “robot” seems to begin dancing to the drop of Senbei’s “Robot Race” about five seconds too early. As the track’s metallic midtempo sound unfolds, the human dances for roughly 45 seconds until Musk called it off with a stern, “Alright. Thank you.”
Musk has warned society about the dangers of AI if it gets out of hand.
“We will not be able to hold a candle to AI,” Musk told Joe Rogan on his podcast. “It’s not ‘necessarily bad,’ it’s just outside of human control. It’s going to be very tempting to use AI as a weapon. In fact, it will be used as a weapon. The danger is going to be humans using it against each other.”
Musk has been overly optimistic with Tesla despite a delay in the company’s production of its vehicles, including the Blade Runner-esque Cybertruck it announced in 2019. And there certainly aren’t high hopes for Tesla Bot being on-time.
Nevertheless, Musk said that a prototype will be available in 2022.
