As robotic technology evolves quickly to perform many tasks people can do – the labor market will feel its full effect. This is why UBI is so necessary.
By: Jason Cartwright
Tesla has just announced that they will build a humanoid robot during their AI Day. This will be 5’8″ in height, weigh 125 pounds and have a top speed of 5MPH. It will also be able to carry 45 pounds and deadlift 150 pounds.
The robot will use a lot of the tech that Tesla has developed as part of its mission to deliver autonomous cars. Elon Musk even said it will use ‘autopilot’ which refers to the computer vision used to drive cars through available space.
Training the robot to navigate the world will be done using their newly announced Dojo supercomputer and Musk says that we should expect the Tesla Bot to perform dangerous or repetitive tasks that humans don’t want to do.
While the joints are shown in red, the exciting part is the visualisation below that shows autopilot cameras used in the front, back and sides of the head, to provide vision for the robot. These are connected to the FSD Computer in the torso.
We learnt through Q&A at the event that the code name for the robot is Optimus. While the concept of a humanoid robot may scare some people as they consider their job prospects of the future, the reality is, I believe we should live in a world where our human abilities are deployed in areas that aren’t able to be done better by robots.
Musk even raised the contentious issue of Universal Basic Income, which could become necessary if a lot of the basic, repeatable jobs, begin to get done by robots. We are obviously a long time away from this robot taking any jobs, but the platform to enable that does appear to be a replication of human abilities, which Tesla is absolutely focused on.
