Elon Musk unveils humanoid robot to take over boring work

By Hyunjoo JinUpdated August 20, 2021 â€" 3.53pmfirst published at 3.17pm

Humans may soon be able to delegate dangerous, repetitive or boring manual work to a “Tesla bot”, with the electric car company’s chief executive Elon Musk saying it plans to launch a humanoid robot prototype next year.

Speaking at Tesla’s AI Day event, the billionaire entrepreneur said the robot, which stands around 173 centimetres tall, would be able to handle jobs from attaching bolts with a wrench to picking up groceries at stores.

The ‘Tesla bot’ is designed to eliminate “dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks,” like bending over to pick something up, or go to the store for groceries, Musk said. “Essentially the future of physical work will be a choice.”

Elon Musk introduces a prototype humanoid robot during a Tesla livestream.

He said it was important to make the machine inexpensive, as well as slower and weaker than humans to put minds at ease. It will weigh around 60 kilograms and walk eight kilometres per hour, with a screen on its face to communicate.

“If you think about what we’re doing right now with cars, Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company because our cars are like semi-sentient robots on wheels,” Musk said.

“With [Tesla’s AI tech] and all the neural nets recognising the world, understanding how to navigate through the world, it kind of makes sense to put that into a humanoid form.”

The robot will have a screen on its face to help it communicate.

The robot would have “profound implications for the economy,” Musk said, addressing a labour shortage. In the future it could also make manual labour purely optional for humans, he said.

“In the long term I do think there needs to be universal basic income. But not right now because the robot doesn’t work.”

The AI Day event came amid growing scrutiny over the safety and capability of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” advanced driver assistant system.

Musk didn’t comment on that scrutiny over the safety of Tesla technology, but said that he was confident of achieving full self-driving with higher safety than humans using current in-car cameras and computers.

American safety regulators earlier this week opened an investigation into Tesla’s driver assistant system because of accidents where Tesla cars crashed into stationary police cars and fire trucks.

At the event on Thursday Tesla also unveiled chips it designed in-house for its high-speed computer, Dojo, to help develop its automated driving system. Musk said Dojo would be operational next year.

He said Tesla will also introduce new hardware for its self-driving computer for its Cybertruck electric ute in “about a year or so.”

Tesla in July pushed back the launch of its much-anticipated Cybertruck from this year, without giving a timeframe for its arrival on the market.

Reuters, with Bloomberg and staff reporters

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