Tesla’s New Robot Is Here To Bring AI Takeover Closer To Reality

Elon Musk clearly doesn’t want to be known merely as an auto executive. He’s made strides in space travel with SpaceX, ventured into energy storage systems and Neuralink and now, he’s come up with a new robot that could replace humans in doing mechanical tasks including household chores and factory work. Take a look at Tesla’s robot, called ‘Optimus’, that could make several jobs obsolete in the near future:  

How good is the new Tesla robot?

Similar to you or I, Optimus has opposable thumbs, camera-based ‘eyes’ on its head, two arms and two legs. In fact, it even weighs as much as a human at 73kg. Of course, instead of muscles, it’s driven by actuators that are much more capable at lifting heavy weights and a 2.3kWh battery pack that’s good enough for a full day’s work without a lunch break. 

The new robot has a similar AI-based system as Tesla’s cars. It can independently act and work without the support of cables or mechanical support, as you can see in the demonstration above. 

Although the project is fairly new (last year’s robot was actually a human dancer in a robot costume), it’s enough to tell that Tesla is serious about building the autonomous robot to take over human tasks. 

Tesla Robot Price 

The robot isn’t available to buy yet, but Musk projects that it’ll cost around Rs 16 lakh per unit, or even less. Tesla will soon put the robot to work at one of its factories to begin ironing out real world issues it might have. 

Also read: 

• Elon Musk Sees Need To Scale Up Battery Production But Won’t Get Into Lithium Mining

• Ola Announces First Electric Car Concept, EV Due To Arrive By Mid 2024

• Plans For Manufacturing In India, What Makes Their EVs Special And More: In Conversation With Henrik Fisker, Founder, Chairman And CEO At Fisker Inc

If AI robots taking over the world is one of your biggest fears, we hope that the demonstration of its rudimentary capabilities will put that fear to rest. However, the concern that it’ll take the place of wage workers and even some salaried employees in certain sectors is very real. 

We are much closer to the eventuality of sharing space with advanced robots in the workplace than ever before, and it’ll take intensive government measures and policy changes to ensure that humans are not adversely affected by the growth and adoption of highly capable robots that can be specialised to do any given task with just a software update.