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Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles on barnacles, Elon Musk has done it again!
He’s only gone and made the most human-seeming humanoid robot of all time hasn’t he? No really, take a look for yourself:
That’s right, for Tesla’s “AI Day” on Thursday, Elon “unveiled” a real-life human being, dancing and dressed up as a robot. Pretty, prettyyyy good.
He did of course admit that this wasn’t a real robot, and that this was just meant to be hilarious. But “the Tesla Bot will be real”, he assured the crowd. After all the Tesla Bot kind of already exists, just not in humanoid form, because as Elon put it:
Tesla is the world’s biggest robotics company because our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels.
Umm, sure.
Elon reckons that they’ll “probably have a prototype some time next year”. We will probably also by that stage have the Tesla Semi (deposits have been taken for that one since 2017 but is still nowhere to be seen); the second-generation Roadster (likewise, with pre-orders also beginning in 2017); and the robotaxi (a million of which were promised by the end of 2020).
The bot is “intended to be friendly”, and will apparently eliminate “dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks”. It will be 5’8 and a slinky 125 lbs, and it has Tesla Autopilot’s system built into it, making use of “all the same tools we have in the car”. What could possibly go wrong.
Also, “you can run away from it and most likely overpower it”:
Hopefully that doesn’t ever happen, but you never know.
Lols all round! 500,000 of ‘em.
Related links:
Billions of Blistering Barnacles – FT Alphaville