All’event on’Artificial Intelligence of Tesla last August 20, Elon Musk takes the stage to announce his ambitious new project: a 176 cm tall humanoid robot which weighs just 56kg and employs 40 electromechanical actuators controlled by the same AI engine as Tesla’s self-driving vehicles. The prototype should be born in 2022 and be able to perform dangerous, tiring or repetitive tasks such as, for example, the’assembly on production lines in’industry or throwing out the garbage in everyday life.
I have always been fascinated by Elon Musk’s communication, able to transmit with great effectiveness the passion for important technological innovations such as l’Tesla’s affordable electric car or SpaceX’s reusable space travel rockets.
L’interest in robotics of one of the largest automotive companies in the world had me fully involved during the streaming of the’event, but as the hours went by I began to pay particular attention to’related superficiality with which Elon Musk treated the founding principles of robotics humanoid.
I work in robotics and I know the complexity of the technological problems to be faced in order to build humanoid robots capable of performing useful tasks for the’man like those created in the Boston Dynamics laboratories, dell’Italian Institute of Technology and other Italian and foreign centers of excellence. Unlike autonomous electric cars, making a humanoid robot poses much more complex problems: the robot must be able to move on legs, in environments built for humans and not on well-defined road routes. Furthermore, humanoids must be able to grab and manipulate objects through robotic hands, tasks that are far more complex than simpler actions such as parking a’car or overtake it.
Elon Musk used a dancer disguised as a Tesla Bot to explain with a dance the complexity of the technological problems that the Tesla Bot prototype will solve in the future. This way of presenting Tesla Bot seemed rather superficial to me because there are already excellent humanoid robots, such as Atlas of Boston Dynamics, able to perform much more advanced actions than those performed by the dancer.
It’s as if Elon Musk oversimplified it what the scientific community has been pursuing by studying for decades. Why use such a cursory way to describe Tesla Bot’s ambitions? Was it a communication strategy more responsive to economic and financial logic, or to the acceptance of technology, rather than the hunger for knowledge of scientists and researchers? I don’t have an answer right now. Certainly the level of technological complexity of humanoid robotics has raised some doubts, as in the article published on IEEE Spectrum, on the future of Tesla’s multifaceted humanoid robot. Some industry experts, for example, are convinced that over time Elon Musk will scale back expectations a lot of these hours to present prototypes of humanoid robots capable of doing only some of the things that were presented during’event. In the article published in The Verge, the authors note that something very similar happened for Hyperloop, with the performance of the transport system all’interior of low pressure pipes that have been significantly scaled down over time.
Elon Musk is one of the most innovative and pragmatic figures of our times and has accustomed us to seeing many of his visionary dreams come true with the foundation of companies of the highest value able to guide entire sectors of reference ranging from transport to neuroscience. The Tesla Bot visionary project probably won’t be since’start able to do everything Elon Musk has stated, but I am sure it will represent one of the technological platforms more advanced, which together with the existing ones, will help the scientific community to face the most important challenges of robotics in the coming years.
The challenges in the future of robotics they do not only concern technology but its cultural, social, economic and ethical implications: what will there be’labor market impact of humanoid robotics? Manual labor will be truly optional for the’man as Elon Musk says? How will our society, founded on work, be transformed if the machines will carry it out? Will we tax the work of robots or implement the universal minimum income principle? The answers to these questions will constitute i founding principles of a new company in which our species will have the privilege of progressing and improving itself using extremely skilled and intelligent robots.
Robotics will replace the’man in’performing dangerous, tiring and alienating tasks leaving us free to cultivate our desires and emotions. Plato argued that “human behavior arises from three main sources: desire, emotion and knowledge “. We may have in common with machines the knowledge of the world we live in, we can code it in algorithms, but desire and emotion are the’essence of’human being: we will continue to be moved by an Olympic gold medal, to laugh with our children, to love and excite ourselves in front of a sunset over the sea.
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