Tesla just announced a whole human sized, human shaped sentient robot. This is not a drill, this is a thing that really just happened. And a lot of things come to mind when hearing that. So let's get into it. Now the two things that might have come to your mind when hearing that, like me, are number one, why Tesla of all companies, and number two, why a robot human of all things.
But if you frame it a certain way, it actually can make a lot of sense. But you got to break a few things down first to get there. So let's get into it.
So Tesla, is a car company, mostly. We’ve seen their announcements, their factories, maybe we'll call it a vehicle company. They have a truck, they have a bunch of other stuff, but they have a factory that makes cars, so theirs is Car Company, but only like by that specific definition, it's actually pretty common to look at Tesla as a software company.
Just because their software advantage and all the things that they do with the software in their cars, is so important to them, it's like they're a software company that happens to make electric cars.
When you compare to the Mercedes of the world, or the Audi's of the world, or BMWs, I would never describe those companies as software companies. But for Tesla, that's where their main advantages is, and so part of this software thing that they're doing is this self-driving project.
Okay. Now, aside from all the massive missed time, windows and overoptimistic promises, and deadlines and things like that, their self-driving is currently as it is today, the most advanced in the world. And it's not because of high resolution mapping, or pre-determined routes. It's because Tesla are using their sensors, and their cameras at this point, and constantly scanning their environments, and making 1000s of little on the fly decisions in real time.
All of the miles driven with this autopilot inaction is used to upload the data back to their servers and train the whole rest of the fleet. So this whole system is a constantly a self-improving thing, the bigger it gets, the faster it can continue to get better.
This requires a lot of computing, a lot of horsepower to be frank and a lot of smart code, and that's what Tesla has been really good at.
So Tesla had their AI day, a couple days ago, you might not have heard about it. But they do this every year, they livestream a bunch of talks from Tesla engineers about computer vision, and how their neural networks have evolved over time, and explaining their focus on making autonomous cars that rely on computer vision, and their synthetic visual cortex.
It's really great, lots of informative, complex stuff. And at this year's event they unveiled their new custom D1 chip, which is a chip that's designed and built entirely in-house by a car company, which is specifically made to train Tesla's full self-driving algorithms based on driving footage even faster, They're basically going to be replacing all of their GPUs they're currently using to make this supercomputer designed to do computer vision, and machine learning. It's big stuff.
During the presentation, Elon on talked about Tesla being basically a robotics company, "Tesla is arguably the world's biggest robotics company, because cars are like sitting semi sentient robots on wheels." If you think about it, it's like, okay, yeah, I could see that. I mean, obviously, Tesla builds cars. So we'll call them a car company still, but like, if it's Tesla's AI day, and they're giving a presentation, and they're trying to make as good of a show as possible for recruiting purposes, they're going to call it robots.
The truth is, they happen to make robots that are on wheels. So yeah, that's how you can get it to make sense mentally.
Self-driving cars, is just one application of AI, and computer vision, and robotics, just to solve that problem. So that's what's happening. It's a bunch of sensors scanning its environment and making a bunch of decisions based on that, and then training future versions of it based on what happens. That's just what's happening in self-driving cars, that I can see making sense.
Elon right afterwards, said this, "It kinds of makes sense to put that on to a humanoid form."
He says it makes sense to make these robots in a humanoid form.
And that is where I disagree.
This is the newly unveiled Tesla robot. It's, called “Test robot.” It's a five foot 825 pound, sleek looking black and white, human shaped robot with a face mask with a screen on it. It's got hands with full 10 fingers. It's got feet, but with no toes. It's pretty slow. It has a max speed of five miles per hour, so that you can outrun it.
It can lift things up to 10 pounds with the arms extended or can deadlift 150, lots of cameras, and actuators. And of course, the full self-driving computer inside.
This thing, it's going to be easy to overpower or run away from. So that should never be concern.
The main purpose, of this Tesla bot, the thing that they kept saying over and over again on stage during the presentation, and during Q&A when asked about it, they kept defaulting to, it will be able to do tasks that are repetitive, dangerous, or boring, so that humans don't have to.
So if you buy Tesla as a robotics company, then yeah, this makes sense.
It's just another robot that will use the sensors to scan the environment and make a bunch of decisions and navigate around this world that it's in. But the thing that I have to say, and this is going to come with the caveat that I'm of course, not a robotics engineer, I'm not an expert at this, but here's my take. The human form is very inefficient.
Now, don't get me wrong, humans were pretty great, right? We're very accomplished species.
We're very complex. And we've done a lot of things well, but humans work as a body so well, because number one, our brains are amazing, and number two, because we've built this world around us that we live in mostly with ergonomics designed for humans.
When it's not designed for humans, like this upright bipedal thing that's balancing all the time, it's not very efficient. I just wrote a retro tech episode about humanoid robots. I will upload the article soon on this platform.
It turns out, 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 one task.
Pop culture forever has been obsessed with humanoid robots.
I can't even count all the instances of humanoid shaped robots in movies and TV shows over the years that we found. It's something we've been fascinated with since the beginning of time. There's endless versions of it.
It turns out, the ideal way to make a robot vacuum the floor for you is not to build a human sized shaped robot that pushes around a vacuum, it's to make the robot, the vacuum and 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, that's the single purpose built robot.
Tesla knows this, you don't have a humanoid shaped robots sitting in your car driving a car for you, the car is the robot, and the self-driving car that drives itself has already been done. So the list of things you would want a human shaped robot for is pretty small.
Because labour is typically not designed around the human form. The one example they kept giving over and over in their AI day presentation was grocery shopping.
You walk to the grocery store, you grab a cart or a basket and you pick out some items and put them in the basket. I guess you need a bunch of different peripherals and things to pull that off.
Maybe a human shaped robot would be fine for that. But there's not a whole lot else I can think of even when I picture the most simple boring tasks, like making a bed, or building a table. When I picture a robot that would be especially good at that I don't picture a human shaped one. I picture one that's super focused and super-efficient. Maybe I'm just short sighted.
I remember when Elon was asked a couple years ago about all the things that they do with robots, versus the couple of things left that they still do with humans, he had a really interesting answer.
"So some parts of it are like 80 to 90% automated, and then some parts of it are like only 10 to 20% done by humans."
He continued to say that, "Humans are really good at adaptation and, and rapid evolution and like doing little, finicky things like that. It's like, trying to connect a hose. But it's like sort of dangling around, and you got like, the robots got to find the hose grab it like then connect it to another hose at that point. It's like really hard. Like a person just go out there. And it's like when you see it, it's like wow, it's super obvious. And then we try to have robots do this. There's like robots like grabbing the wrong thing and like stick it over here and it's like, oh, the hose was here when the robot was here and snap like tries to grab air and then like smashes into the car. It is like a Coronavirus tragedy of ours."
All that really made me think. With as good as Tesla is with self-driving why would you want a humanoid or Human shaped robot to try to do things that humans are already good at?
How long is it going to take for that robot to actually get good at things that humans are good at?
The best way to answer that would probably be to look at the most advanced robotics company that I can think of at the moment, which is Boston Dynamics.
There's two very different types of humanoid robots that I've seen exist in this world. On one end, it's like the dumb single purpose thing you see at CES. These are the barely functional robots that can really do only a few things decently well. They're kind of cheesy looking. They're human shaped for no reason. But they exist.
On the other end of the spectrum, there's Boston Dynamics, Atlas. I wish I could have seen Atlas in person, because just the dog spot is already impressive enough.
It's got the sensors, it has a basic level of understanding and scanning its environment. It can be programmed to do dangerous or boring or repetitive things, and go places that humans wouldn't go.
We say dog because they've called it spot, and it's kind of looks like a dog if you make it behave the right way, sometimes, but really, it's just a quadruped Ed, any four legged animal would do.
But Atlas, on the other hand, well, I haven't necessarily seen it do anything specifically useful yet. But seeing that five foot human shaped robot, navigate the world, in crazy ways, is something else.
But even after all these years of development and the history of how much we've seen it get better, atlas is not a robot that's going to be on sale for people to buy anytime soon. And if you ask them about it, they'll tell you, it's just them experimenting with their computing in a new form factor.
At the end of the day, my take, test robot probably won't exist anytime soon, either. I know they said on stage, there would be a prototype maybe next year. I kind of doubt that they're going to leap for Boston Dynamics in the next two years.
Here's the other thing, even if they do come out with it. Tesla right now is training their self-driving computers, with billions and billions of miles of self-driving happening on the streets today, right? The best way to get as much data about that as possible is to have it go out in the real world. And do it.
It's kind of genius, actually, that they're making so many cars, and people are really using it for them. But now they're going to be asking for a humanoid robot to go out and navigate the entire rest of the real world where there's an order of magnitude, more stuff to identify and react to.
I mean, on the streets, there's obviously other cars and trucks and buses, and it can identify motorcycles and bicycles, and pedestrians even. And then there's traffic cones, and there's lights and all the rest of the traffic control devices, construction zones, arrows on the road, is kind of starting to run out. That's almost it.
But how well is the Tesla bot going to do when you ask it to go get bananas from the grocery store? Like really? How good could it get?
Or if you ask it, “Hey, Tesla bot, go grab my air pods max from downstairs?” Is it going to be able to know that that's headphones? Or is it going to have to have a model of every new pair of headphones that ever comes out to be able to identify which one you're talking about?
All of this training has to come from real world data, which I guess would have to come from people using Tesla bots in their homes and starting to get this going, which seems a little less likely to me than people getting a self-driving car.
There's just a whole bunch of other unknowns about this robot like to what other colours will it come in?
Will it come in matte black?
How does it charge?
Will it just sit on a USB port in the corner of a room every day? I don't know.
Will this ever even go on sale?
Honestly, it could really just be Tesla exploring their computer vision in another form factor just like Boston Dynamics.
It's just about Tesla becoming the best AI and computer vision company that they possibly can. This is just one more avenue to get better at it. So there's no good reason I can think of for a humanoid robot to exist out there in people's hands anyway. But such presentations and endeavours make a lot of good headlines. It's obviously something we've been fascinated with forever and will continue to be for a long time.
It could just be one more form factor that Tesla is exploring, a good free PR opportunity.
Anyway, that's about my thoughts on it. I'm super curious what you guys think!
If you have any thoughts on if would you want something like this in your own home? Do you think the robot will exist? Comment section will be fun below this one. Anyway, thanks for reading, See you guys in the next one. PEACE!
