Last week, Tesla Inc's AI Day announced the Tesla Bot by showing off a person dressed in black and white spandex doing a dance on the stage. It was weird.
First things first, the design of the Tesla Bot is awful. As a "general purpose, bi-pedal, humanoid robot capable of performing tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring," this machine is likely to be used in the home. I'll set the scene: it's evening, you've switched off the majority of the lights in your flat for the glow of tableside lamps and the TV. You remember that your glasses are in the bedroom so you stroll over to collect them and suddenly you're face to face with this faceless stooge. As aforementioned, the design is awful.
"Our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels," said Elon Musk, CEO and product architect of the company and also an annoying person on Twitter. "It kind of makes sense to put that on to a humanoid form. We're also quite good at sensors and batteries and actuators so we think we'll probably have a prototype some time next year that basically looks like this."
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Right. To compare, the Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics has only been designed to explore the potential of robotics and is nowhere near ready for commercial purposes. However, Musk and Tesla Inc reckon that there'll be Tesla Bots in your local Currys PC World in a few years time. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions on whether this will actually happen or if we'll see two dancers dressed in spandex next time.
The reactions to the terrifyingly impersonal robots has been very good, at least. Now that you say it, it does look a little like the Human Being mascot from the TV show Community. Even actor Will Smith wasn't thrilled with what he saw at the company's AI Day.
At the moment, it's not known how the Tesla Bot will actually act, but it has been developed to be easily overpowered if the need arises. Which it shouldn't, really, because the Tesla Bots are cool. Right?
Featured Image Credit: Tesla Inc, 20th Century Fox
