🤖 Why is Tesla building a robot?
Is Tesla a car company, or a robot company?
Tesla makes cars, solar panels, and now apparently they make robots too.
On 1st October, Tesla held their ‘AI Day’, a presentation of all the things that they are doing in artificial intelligence.
You can watch the whole 3.5 hour show here.
The star of the show was ‘Optimus’, a humanoid robot that can walk slowly and wave at the crowd. Yet it’ not immediately clear why Tesla, a car company, would be building humanoid robots.
Yes Elon does have a habit of starting surprising new products and sells some rather random products - such as a Giga Texas Belt Buckle.
But this feels like something entirely different. First of all developing a custom belt buckle is one thing, but building a full humanoid robot is a serious project. Not only that, but Elon has said previously that the Tesla robot is a priority in their product development pipeline.
In terms of priority of products, I think actually the most important product development we’re doing this year is the Optimus humanoid robot. ~ Elon Musk, January 2022
Tesla’s stated mission is “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.”
Notice it doesn’t say anything about robots.
So why is Tesla doing this?
Let’s look at what Elon said about it; “the foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is distilled labor. So what happens if you don’t actually have a labor shortage? I’m not sure what an economy even means at that point. That’s what Optimus is about.”
So building robot is intended to solve Tesla’s labour shortages?
Has Tesla faced significant labor shortages?
The only clue I could find about labour shortages was from from Germany, where there were challenges finding enough skilled battery cell workers for the new Berlin Gigafactory. But generally Tesla doesn’t seem to have faced labour shortages elsewhere.
Tesla production lines are already stuffed with industrial robots, but they also realised at some point there is such a thing as ‘too many robots’. Previously the Model 3 production line was considered to be the most highly automated car assembly lines in the world. This was the time when the Model 3 was just starting to be mass produced, but Tesla was struggling to scale production to meet demand. Trying to add robots to as much of the production process as possible ended up being counter-productive, and in the end the assembly line had to be reconfigured to let the humans back in.
“Humans are underrated” - Elon Musk, 2018
This flexibility and adaptability of human workers is why Tesla still employs ~100,000 people.
Not to be deterred, the lesson that Elon seems to have drawn from this humbling experience is that if highly specialised industrial robots are not going to work, what is really needed is a general purpose robot.
Thus the Optimus is humanoid, with arms and legs and a head.
Incidentally, I’m not sure why people are so keen to build humanoid robots, hasn’t anyone seen iRobot?
Anyway, building the Optimus doesn’t seem to be about solving labour shortages, as Tesla hasn’t faced significant labour shortages.
It also doesn’t seem to be about automating more of the production line, as that has already been done as far as is reasonably possible. So it’s still a bit of a mystery why it’s such a priority.
Another clue comes from Elon’s Twitter account, where he hinted at another purpose of the Tesla Bot earlier this year.
AGI or artificial general intelligence, is a topic that Elon has been interested in for some time. In 2017, he said that artificial intelligence could pose a risk to the “fundamental existential risk for human civilisation”.
Wow, so AI is a risk to human civilisation, but Tesla is working on AGI?
This would seem strange, but Elon clearly sees Tesla as a place that should be trusted to work on AGI.
I his opening remarks at AI day , Elon touted the fact that Tesla being a public company meant that it had the governance structures in place to work on AGI.
I’m not sure that’s a particularly strong reason, as public companies have done plenty of shady things before. Simply being a public company doesn’t seem like strong enough oversight to work on what some people consider to be the most highest risk to humanity this century.
Even so, Elon seems to want to portray Tesla as a morally responsible company that will develop safe and ‘gentle’ AI.
In the end though there could be a rather simpler explanation.
Tesla has had a somewhat rocky relationship with their employees at times, with efforts to unionise being discouraged, labour laws being infringed, and Elon being famously against working from home.
I don’t like to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but perhaps there is a less benevolent reason that Elon would like to build a humanoid robot - to replace some of those pesky and expensive employees.
Even as I dug deeper into this topic, I found the reasons given by Tesla and Elon as to why they were focussing so much on building humanoid robots quite unconvincing.
Building humanoid robots is undoubtably a valuable thing to do, it just still seems strange to me that Tesla would invest so much in this area.
Elon has many other side project companies; the Boring Company, Neuralink, Open AI etc. So why not spin the Optimus project off into its own company? It could even be a non-profit if the motive is to ensure that AI is developed safely - something that could also be considered for Open AI by the way. This would increase the oversight and safety aspects that are going to be critical.
Tesla still has a long way to go in its core mission. The Cybertruck has been delayed several times already, the long-delayed long-haul Semi hasn’t yet delivered any trucks (though Pepsi may get the first models in December), and the solar roof continues to face significant supply issues.
Fixing these challenges seems much more central to Tesla’s mission of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, a mission that remains as urgent and important as it was when Tesla first started. Until this is close to being achieved, this focus on Optimus seems like a distraction. Then again, who am I to tell Elon how to run his companies.
So far, I don’t feel very satisfied by the explanations I have heard from Tesla or Elon as to why they are building Optimus, so if you have other ideas I might have missed, hit reply and let me know.
Until next time,
Jamie
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