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Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

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Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#111

Post by abledon »

tablespoon wrote: post #107
camjohnson26 wrote: post #2

Reveals it with a person in a suit dancing to dubstep: https://twitter.com/TESLAcharts/status/1428540624203128837?s...

> Reveals it with a person in a suit dancing to dubstep: https://twitter.com/TESLAcharts/status/1428540624203128837?s... In five years, Tesla bot version 1.0 will be a Tesla-brand gig-work slave wearing that silly robot suit. In ten years, they'll still be working on the robotic version 2.0, which they will be perpetually promising to release "next year."

> https://twitter.com/TESLAcharts/status/1428540624203128837?s...

That was hilarious, the way they gave a nod to asimo walking up stairs, the perfect cheesy dubstep music, then the cringe dance... what balls haha. If people can't laugh at this then what the hell

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#113

Post by discodave »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #53

Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he's had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the difficulty is much higher and entirely different skills are required. SpaceX and Tesla are great achievements, but they are primarily stories of successfully implementing and improving existing technologies with innovative engineering and business practices (like…

Or, he likes press releases to distract from other ahem, issues that Tesla has. Like the current court cases about their "self driving" technology.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/tesla-autopilot-self-driving...

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#114

Post by gamegoblin »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #105
gamegoblin wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they could see use in cities for delivery or patrol type jobs. The stakes are so much lower for a 50kg robot moving at walking pace compared to a car. Consider a pizza delivery operation. You could imagine having dozens of robots delivering pizzas, and even if you had to have one or two humans driving around town getting robots out of stuck edge cases when they happened, it could still be a net gain. Consider…

Do you know how little pizza delivery guys get paid? Not a chance they get replaced by a million dollar robot this century. And lest we forget: “HitchBOT, the hitchhiking robot, gets beheaded in Philadelphia” https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-ph...

I assume if Tesla actually does intend to build them, they will be targeting a price point in the tens of thousands instead of $1M range. That is, priced comparable to a car.

If a robot cost say, $50k, they could seriously be cost effective compared to humans if they don’t have a ton of maintenance costs.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#115

Post by Retric »

staticassertion wrote: post #81
renjimen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even naming a few would actually help your argument, since you can think of so many

Can you not? Like, how about people who have made major academic or philosophical breakthroughs? Major authors? Even within business, or celebrity, Elon doesn't stick out much other than filling a small niche. The problem with naming them is that then it becomes a discussion on whether the people I've named are impressive. Someone mentioned Einstein and was downvoted. Einstein is very obviously more interesting and a…

The point is they needed to make multiple significant independent breakthroughs in established fields.

Turing like a lot of pioneers is seriously overrated. When surrounded by low hanging fruit it’s easy to seemingly make a great deal of progress especially when your credited with formalizing existing ideas or making that one last step into usefulness.

Einstein actually pushed boundaries in a well established field which is vastly more impressive. Musk significantly pushing the boundaries in cars, rockets, computer networks, and banking is quite impressive in that context. We can quibble about PayPal, but I am being consistent in ignoring the charging network and self driving system etc as those are emerging fields. Clearly he’s not operating alone, but few people did.

Newton is perhaps the most obvious example of significant progress in independent and established fields and IMO far more impressive, but it’s really not a long list.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#116

Post by CommieBobDole »

rococode wrote: post #80
CommieBobDole wrote: post #53

Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he's had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the difficulty is much higher and entirely different skills are required. SpaceX and Tesla are great achievements, but they are primarily stories of successfully implementing and improving existing technologies with innovative engineering and business practices (like…

I feel people said the same thing about him for SpaceX and Tesla back when he was just the wacky PayPal guy. Remember SpaceX's first launch was in 2006 (before the iPhone existed!) and it's only started getting really serious traction in the past 5 years. Elon's no stranger to things that don't have any "useful form" for well over a decade. I'm quite certain he's aware of the realistic timelines, and he sells a diffe…

That is a good point; Musk does sometimes announce things that essentially serve as a placeholder for "we're going to do this thing once the technology improves enough to make it feasible", and this is likely more of the same.

But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with; the closest thing would be the whole "full self-driving without LIDAR" thing, which keeps getting pushed back and is likely not possible with current technology. And building a humanoid robot that can actually do stuff is probably an order of magnitude more difficult than that.

If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#117

Post by stickfigure »

handmodel wrote: post #43
Geee wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It needs to be compatible with all human spaces and human tools. It'll need to be general purpose to keep unit costs low. This is why the human form is the best. It's not a menial home robot. It's designed to replace humans in every kind of physical labor.

This reminds me of images from the 1900s depicting the future when there were humanoid robots with lots of arms cleaning lots of dishes at once. Of course, it turns out, we did invent a machine to wash dishes but its just called a dish washing machine and is way better at it than humans with arms. I can't imagine many tasks where a humanoid will be useful. I'm sure you could say that something like house construction…

How much would you be willing to pay for a machine that folds laundry? At least as much as the machine that washes them, I imagine.

So far the only machines that have come even remotely close to being able to fold laundry (and they aren't very good) have humanoid arms.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#119

Post by elihu »

dartharva wrote: post #22

Why humanoid? That's such an inefficient and overcomplicated structure for a "menial job" home robot. This is either a PR stunt or a luxury product.

I would hope that they can use a framework that's general enough to adapt to other form factors. So, making a humanoid is a way of giving themselves a difficult enough initial problem that they're less likely to be fooled by early success: the humanoid robot will have to self-balance, walk, open doors, and do a lot of the complex things that humans do without thinking in order to be considered a minimum-viable product.

In the long run if this pans out, I'd expect to see farming and weeding hexapods, equipment-hauling centaurs, wheeled platforms with arms for getting around office spaces, construction bots with long-fingered hands and asymmetrical multi-jointed appendages, and so on. If the AI has a general capacity for motor-skill learning, then you can just give it whatever body is most optimal for the task at hand.

I'm reminded of this video on training an AI to walk through simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgaEE27nsQwh

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#120

Post by sonoffett »

staticassertion wrote: post #81
renjimen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even naming a few would actually help your argument, since you can think of so many

Can you not? Like, how about people who have made major academic or philosophical breakthroughs? Major authors? Even within business, or celebrity, Elon doesn't stick out much other than filling a small niche. The problem with naming them is that then it becomes a discussion on whether the people I've named are impressive. Someone mentioned Einstein and was downvoted. Einstein is very obviously more interesting and a…

What do you mean by "people with multiple Turing awards"?
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