Wow, can't believe we just about called it, Tesla are launching a humanoid robot. And
yes, some of us thought potentially they would purchase Boston Dynamics, with a few clues
lying around, and I know some of you actually said Tesla would just build a robot in-house
themselves too, so well done credit to those of you. But when it came to their own battery
they did acquire other companies such as Maxwell Technologies and Hibar Systems, so it was
a fair assumption.
But I did literally say perhaps there will be a domesticated type of robot, and it seems
that's what we are getting. A robot to eliminate dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks. Combine
that with everything else Tesla has to offer, with the AI, neural net, vision, sensors,
batteries, etc. Like I said before, robots compliment Tesla's intellectual property immensely.
And Tesla cars are really already robots that can drive us around anyway.
It doesn't sound like it will necessarily be used as part of the manufacturing process
for Tesla. At least that is not its intended purpose. Who knows what they may be capable
of in the future.
This will of course just be the first version of the robot, and they will learn a lot from
there and there will more versions after that, I mean look at the difference between the
original roadster and the Model Y.
It sounds like this will be a domestic robot, but perhaps there will be industrial versions
too.
I mean we all imagine something similar to the movie iRobot, a live-in servant type of
robot, to do our cleaning, tidying, washing, maybe even cooking. Elon even said it could
go to the supermarket and shop for us. I mean that has serious value. First FSD saves
us 5 to 10 hours a week of having to drive a car. Now a robot to save us all the other
time of these mundane tasks, or boring and repetitive as Elon says. Or saves us the cost
of having a cleaner in once a week.
If we look back just 100 years even life was so much harder than today, let alone 200 years.
Perhaps in 10 to 20 years we will look back and wonder how we even managed to cope these
days with all these annoying chores we have to do. Trying to cook 3 meals a day. Wash
all your clothes continually, keep the house clean and tidy. Wash your car. Maintain your
garden. These are not the things in life we enjoy. But we dont have a choice. Just like
some people used to have to walk miles for clean water, and then carry it back, each
and every day. Ok life for us is much much easier than that now. But almost all of us
would rather be out with friends and spending time with our family rather than cleaning
a house.
Elon assures us that the robots will not be able to harm us, and we can over power them
easily, and also outrun them as they have a max speed of just 5 mph. Although this is
kind of funny, I think he is serious.
So if there is an industrial version then I guess it cant be too strong, and thus lift
heavy items. I am not sure how that would work. Same with grip strength you wouldnt
want it possible to be strong enough to break human bonea. Because Elon literally said "You
never know". Which is why I am glad Tesla is going to lead the world in the directions
of robotics and AI. Other than CEOs like Mark Zuckerbug act very nonchalant over the way
it evolves. But even if the robot does try and attack
a human, it sounds like its physical capabilities might be minimal. I suppose unless it can
use a gun or some form of weapon, and surely there would be several ways to shut down the
robot's power source too. Wow, there is so much to think about here.
Elon says universal basic income may come into play. As doing physical work may become
optional. But what does everyone do all day if they
don't have to work, just plug into neural link?
On the other hand, as many economists say, historically new technologies have opened
up more jobs, and opportunities so far. The thing is, it just requires more skilled labor,
and retraining, and less available work for the layman.
Take this scenario. Perhaps you have a gardener, but now there is a robot to do the gardening
for you. The robot comes to your house to do the work, but there is also a human assistant.
You tell the human how you would like your garden to look. The human then instructs or
programs the gardening robot to do the work. Except that the robot, or perhaps robots,
are able to do these tasks at a much faster rate than a human, with a lot more precision,
and tasks that are not even humanly possible, or take minutes instead of weeks.
For example perhaps you have a bush that the robot can literally sculpture for you. This
would not have really been humanly possible. So these robots take perhaps an hour to do
your entire garden, and you are left with a master piece. The cost is just one hours
time for the robot programmer along with their cost of the capital equipment. Whereas to
get the same results, it may have cost hundreds of hours of a humans time.
You end up with the robot gardener programmer earning significantly more than a traditional
gardener, and as a result so many more gardens can be maintained to a higher standard at
a lower cost. Machines create leverage. But this could be on a much higher exponential
scale, or order of magnitude, as that's the Tesla way.
Elon mentioned they will be able to use power tools. Imagine if they replace a lot of builders
jobs. The human jobs on the construction site, may be to program these robots. It sounds
like within time a lot of jobs can be replaced. We are told the robots are designed to navigate
through a human world. Although it will be able to take instructions
through voice, rather than having to program it line by line. So perhaps there will be
various skills to learn in ways to talk to the robot to do specific tasks. A builder
would need to be able to talk communicate to it in building terms for example, not having
to actually write code. And there may be various optional accessories for these robots to depending
on the application. Thus opening up more opportunities for 3rd parties.
This isn't just creative destruction, this is the creative destruction. Accompanied with
AI, that will become vastly more intelligent than humans can ever imagine. Then maybe there
is just minimal point in us working. And perhaps the AI can invent new products for us to vastly
improve our lives further. They should hopefully be here entirely to serve us. We all get our
own servants, that are potentially more capable at a lot of tasks than us. Imagine 3 star
Michelin quality dinners every night. Again that it does open up opportunities,
perhaps a famous chef, or your favorite restaurant, offer their recipes downloadable for the robot
to replicate, and you simply pay for them, like some sort of app store. It is possible
they open up a lot more jobs than they close down, especially if it results in massive
deflation, which sounds inevitable with all this Tesla technology.
So how much would you pay such a robot? Well for starters you could compare it to the cost
of having a full time servant, just like FSD is like having a full time chauffeur. But
think how much time it might save you a week, it must be 10 to 20 hours, I guess depending
on the size of your house, or how much effort you put into cooking your own meals. Ok perhaps
cooking might be a bit advanced for the first version. But we expect the first robot to
be capable of some applications, and would have thought at least cleaning and tidying.
If you make $25 an hour, and the robot saves you 10 hours a week, then that can be argued
as $250 of value a week, or around $13,000 a year.
But even if they cost $50,000 then that would still pay itself off in about 3 years time,
which is a good investment. But I would have thought $20,000 or so would
be a fair price point with8in time. But it would also depend on what it could do.
If it is capable of helping building a house, and could perhaps eliminate one job on the
site, or even multiple, then you are looking at a value of $50-100,000. And perhaps it
needs to learn these skill first of actually how to build a house, which might again come
into the app store, where builders and coder collaborate into making a program for the
robots, to give it the set of skills it needs. Or what if eventually they could even replace
doctors. Remember if its a home robot, well there is
only so much cleaning, tidying and gardening to do, it would be likely sitting idle for
most of the time. So perhaps they may end up costing more like
$100,000, and we are back to our scenario when the robot comes to you and cleans your
house, and then leaves to the next house, and likely goes door-to-door in a self driving
Tesla, or orders a Robotaxi each time.
And possibly Tesla could go into replacing limbs, or robotic prosthetics. There is so
much potential.
Wow, isn't this an exciting future. And none of this would have been possible without Elon
Musk and the talented team at Tesla. I really would love to thank them for bringing so much
hope, and so much to look forward to in the future.
I mean can you just imagine what life would have been like without Tesla now? What would
there to be look forward to? Waymo? We don't even have Steve Jobs visionary talent any
more. And not only that this enthusiasm, vision and innovation spreads across the world, and
gives children the belief that anything is possible. It changes our outlook on the world.
And for that I am forever thankful.
And no I havent forgotten about how impressive Dojo sounds and the outsanding progress Tesla
are making on FSD, it's just a lot of data to take in at once, so I will break it down
once I have had time to process it enough. And right now I really did just feel like
talking about this Robot.
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