I, Tesla: One small step for robot-kind
Make way for Tesla’s robots, said Kirsten Korosec in TechCrunch. At the electric-car maker’s second annual AI Day last week, a semi-functional “humanoid” walked on stage alongside CEO Elon Musk, “albeit with exposed cables and a bit wobbly.” A second robot, which couldn’t walk but featured more humanlike hands to pick up boxes and water plants, was lugged on stage by staff. The demo was aimed to show the headway made on Musk’s visionary “Tesla Bot,” which was introduced conceptually last year—and memorably represented by an actor in a bodysuit. “We’ve come a long way,” Musk said. The big question is whether all of the company’s efficiencies—such as using the same supercomputer in its vehicles as in the bot—“will result in a scalable robot that works.” Musk, of course, thinks it’s possible, and says a commercial version could be ready in three to five years and sell for under $20,000.
Was this much better than a person in a robot suit? asked Mike Pearl and Chance Townsend in Mashable. From the demo, it wasn’t clear that the answer is “yes.” In a three-hour presentation showing off his “stiff, stumbling robots,” Musk made “constant appeals for the audience’s good faith and reasonable expectations,” even joking at one point, “We just didn’t want it to fall on its face.” The wireless Optimus—Tesla’s name for the robot—still required “a whole team around to keep it from toppling over.” Musk has touted his machines as a means to turn all human physical labor into “a choice,” said Samantha Masunaga in the Los Angeles Times. But automation “is not the silver bullet Musk has portrayed it as.” Robotics has been involved in agriculture and manufacturing for hundreds of years. “It’s unclear why making additional robots shaped like people would be more beneficial,” other than the fact that robots “don’t complain about long hours or in-person work”—or form unions.
It’s only fair to consider the context, said Evan Ackerman in IEEE Spectrum: “Tesla has made this happen in something like eight months. That’s nuts.” I can see the appeal of working for Tesla for someone starting a robotics career, “since you’d get to work on a rapidly evolving hardware platform backed by what I can only assume are virtually unlimited resources.” Tesla is also “potentially its own biggest customer,” with plenty of in-house practical tasks that the robot can train on. Still, “most of what we saw in the presentation was hardware.” Software will be “a much more significant challenge when it comes to making robots useful in the real world.” And so far, we have no indication that Tesla is any better at that than anyone else.