Teslabot — Future or flop?
Will Tesla be the next big thing in the robotics world?
The announcement
Last Friday(8/20/21) during Teslas 3 hour “AI-day” presentation, after a fantastic walkthrough of some incredible self-driving technology that will be rolling out soon and new information about the “Dojo” supercomputer, out walks a dancing robot.
Well… someone dressed as a robot, though according to Musk it could be as early as next year that we see the real deal.
Elon Musk had some interesting things to say about Tesla’s plans to make a robot (codename Optimus) using the same visual AI technology used in their self-driving cars to replace dangerous, repetitive, or boring labor tasks.
The robot will stand 5 feet 8 inches tall, weigh 125 pounds, and be able to do things such as carrying 45 pounds of weight, Deadlifting 150 pounds, and have a top speed of 5mph.
He also joked about the robot being programmed to be “friendly” and that with a low top speed you could easily run away or even overpower it.
Why it just might work
“Arguably, Tesla is the world’s biggest robotics company because our cars are essentially semi-sentient robots on wheels” — Elon Musk
I think this is a great point. There are 200,000+ teslas on the road with the autopilot 2.0 hardware, which gets better continuously.
Some estimate that there will be over 30 million autonomous vehicles on the road by 2040, And I find it hard to believe that Tesla won’t be a high percentage of that number.
Musk also says “If we don’t make it, someone else will. So we should, and make sure it’s safe”
As many people know, we have some incredibly powerful humanoid robots in the world already. Take Boston Dynamics Atlas for example, which recently released a video of two Atlas robots doing parkour and ending the course with a few backflips for good measure. I mean, how else could you end it?
I think a major factor that we will see play out is that Tesla on its own had a revenue of 31.5 billion in 2020 and could this year reach over 50 billion. Elon himself now has a total net worth of 185 billion. With that amount of money, plus the fact that they attract some of the greatest minds in the world today, I don’t think these claims are very far-fetched.
What would this mean for the economy?
“This I think will be quite profound, If you say what is the economy, at the foundation it is labor.” — Elon Musk
Ok, I’m going to speculate a lot here because who knows?
At one point in the presentation, Musk talks about a world where you don’t have to do physical work, only if you want to. What exactly that means, I’m not sure.
Let’s start with the main use case described which was to replace humans in jobs where the work could cause injury, the task is so repetitive that nobody wants to(or should) do it, or it is extremely boring.
Let’s just say, There are millions of jobs that this technology could potentially replace.
Imagine in 7 years that Teslabots are mainstream, and have taken a large portion of the qualifying jobs. How large of an effect would this have on the workforce? Would people move into more creative and less dangerous work?
Around 5000 people die each year from fatal work injuries, this is consistent since the early 2000s. There are a few years where it dips into the 4000 range, but that still means that in the last 20 years around 100,000 people have died from work-related injuries. Is this a trend that Teslabots could change?
But this isn’t just about dangerous jobs, boring jobs too? Musk hints at the bots being able to complete tasks such as going to get your groceries as well.
This is why he mentions that long term, he thinks we will need some sort of Universal Basic Income which is a highly debated topic on its own.
While we would need some sort of system in place, it’s hard to tell if this would be the right direction to go.
No matter what scenario you think through, there is no avoiding that there would be large changes taking place if this project is not only successful but accepted and implemented large scale. A lot of people are still wary about self-driving cars… now we are talking about humanoid robots working factory jobs and delivering their Postmates.
What is “Dojo” anyways?
Traditionally a Dojo is a training place for martial arts. Tesla’s type of Dojo, well.. is kind of the same thing but for computers!
In the beginning, artificial intelligence wasn’t very intelligent at all. It was really just a long file filled with if / else statements (You are going outside. IF it is raining grab an umbrella! Otherwise, don’t bother with the umbrella)
As time went on, things got more advanced and now the most ambitious AI developers model their work after the human brain!
Our brains consist of neurons connected by different types of threads to other neurons. Using these connecting threads the neurons can send electrical or chemical signals to the other cells. This is what is described as a Biological Neural Net. This has become the inspiration for the latest and greatest AI technology.
The largest difference between the traditional if / else approach and an Artificial Neural Net ( NN for short ) is that instead of a rule-based system where everything is programmed, an NN is trained by experience.
It can process thousands or millions of samples during “training” and it assigns a weight of importance to each while extracting the characteristics “right” and “wrong” of each scenario.
Dojo is an “exaflop class supercomputer” that upon completion may be the fastest computer in the world for AI training.
It will be consist of 120 training tiles which enables the 1.1 exaflop capability.
What’s the most impressive to me is how modular this entire system is, each training tile is made up of 25 D1 chips, another incredible technology that Tesla has created.
This chip is the power behind the system. It was designed for maximum bandwidth and to move information as quickly as possible, and with 120 training tiles that means 3000 of these chips firing away at once.
So, in a nutshell, that is what Dojo will be. Elon believes the project will be complete in the next year and this will enable Tesla autopilot to do some incredible things while rapidly improving and handling unusual situations while driving.
This is what will catapult Tesla to the next level.
There was also talk about the next generation being able to 10x the efficiency of the current system.
Final thoughts
Tesla’s presentation was filled with great information and cutting-edge technology. It was certainly a lot to digest but I would recommend for anyone to give it a listen.
Regardless of your feelings about AI, self-driving cars, and robots living amongst us, I believe it is the unavoidable future. Throughout human history, we have been driven by innovation and progress. We have to be ready to accept that our future involves a lot of new and crazy-sounding technology, now if it's the Teslabot, Atlas, or something new and unheard-of as of yet there is no way to know. But it will be something, and it may be mainstream a lot quicker than the general public expects.
I am by no means an expert on the topics I covered today, but I do find it extremely interesting and I hope everyone who reads this will too.
