Elon Musk Tesla’s Optimus : future of abundance

Elon Musk unveiled prototype versions of Tesla‘s Optimus robot at Tesla‘s AI Day 2022 event on Friday. It waved to the audience and raised its knees. The Optimus bot is powered by the same autopilot hardware in Tesla‘s cars. The AI was then re-tooled for its new environment, motion capturing real-world tasks like lifting a box. The company’s experiences developing driver assistance systems for Tesla vehicles, in particular computer vision systems, were helping the company figure out how to make a humanoid robot work in the real world.

An interesting problem is being looked upon: how to make a machine that can replace a human. Investors and financial analysts have expressed skepticism that Tesla will turn to robotics, advising it to focus, instead, on projects closer to Tesla‘s core business of electric cars. But Tesla is interested in solving the above interesting problem.

From Dancing Human to Walking Humanoid

Last year, in Tesla’s AI Day 2021, it was just a person in a robotic suit. And within one year it’s a real robot that can walk and wave. This can be marked as a big achievement and more are yet to come.

While the AI Day presentation was still underway, Musk wrote to his 107.4 million followers on Twitter (a Social media giant). “Naturally, there will be a cat-girl version of our Optimus robot.”

Current economy is limited by people and productivity, but an AI bot like Tesla‘s could change the calculation. Tesla‘s Optimus could handle manual labor, an economy becomes quasi-infinite. This means a future of abundance. A future where there is no poverty, where you could have whatever you want in terms of products and services. This might be a fundamental transformation of civilization. Elon Musk told the crowd he plans to make the robot at high volume and low cost as quickly as possible.

Will Cost Less Than a Car

Optimus is designed to be a very capable robot. When made in very high volume (millions of units), it is expected to cost much less than a car. It would probably be less than $20,000, guesses the Tesla CEO. “We always want to be careful we don’t go down the Terminator path,” Musk cautioned, referring to a blockbuster film about a killer cyborg.

One of the purposes of this event was to convince some of the most talented people in the world to come to Tesla and help bring everything to fruition. Musk emphasized that the company is public-owned too. Musk claimed, ” ‘the public controls Tesla ‘ — an idiosyncratic contention that seems to conflate public trading of stock with public ownership. In any case,” Musk pointed out, “if I go crazy, you can fire me — this is important. Maybe I’m not crazy.”

But there’s  no reason to think the development of robot hardware and software is suddenly going to give rise to fresh claims that Musk is crazy as similar robot development operations. Because other companies, like Honda and Toyota, have been going on un-controversially for decades.

But its Elon Musk‘s Promise

Unfortunately, for years, Elon Musk has been selling us fantasies to distract from the reality of the future he’s trying to build. More cars, colonization dreams, and techno-kings have distracted us from urgent problems  such as climate change. Tesla has a history of aggressive price targets that it doesn’t ultimately reach. The Tesla Model 3 was long promised as a $35,000 vehicle. But this could only very briefly be purchased for that price, and not directly on its website.

The most affordable Tesla Model 3 now costs $46,990. Back when Musk originally floated the Tesla Bot concept at AI Day 2021, he said: “It should be able to, ‘please go to the store and get me the following groceries,’ that kind of thing.” Tesla revealed the Cyber-truck in 2019. Its pick-up truck that remains unavailable for purchase today, it was said to cost $39,990. But the price has since been removed from Tesla’s website. All these things indicate that Tesla has not been so careful about the timelines.

Also see : Boston Dynamics Dog Robot