Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Tesla Bot: Is a Humanoid Robot a Good Idea?

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

This week, Marques and Andrew discuss the new, slightly crazy announcement from Tesla: the Tesla Bot! Tesla Bot is a planned humanoid robot that will be able to help people with everyday, boring/repetitive tasks. But this announcement begs the question: is a humanoid robot really the best option? Marques and Andrew debate that conundrum, as well as read questions from the community Discord to see how people think Tesla Bot might help humanity in the future. Links: Subscribe to the pod & share with friends: http://bit.ly/WaveformMKBHD Subscribe to the pod on YouTube for full videos: https://bit.ly/WVFRMPodcastYouTube https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 https://twitter.com/DougDeMuro https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Marques and I'm Andrew. And today, I think we're kind of I think we're going to talk about the Tesla bot in every detail possible. There's a lot of there's a lot of versions of how you can talk about the Tesla bot. But just for those who haven't heard, the overall announcement that we're addressing is Tesla had an announcement at their AI day where they announced a humanoid robot. And now Andrew is, if you aren't watching the video, you can't see, but he's wearing a helmet that makes you look like a humanoid robot. Oh, God. Yeah. A helmet that makes you look like a humanoid robot. Oh, God, yeah. I feel like the Daft Punk combo with the humanoid robot, that's something. I mean, the one helmet, the gold Daft Punk robot,

looks pretty similar to what? It's much better dressed. Yeah, yeah. So I guess let's just break down. I'm going to start with how we got here. How we got here and what it is. So Tesla makes cars. Tesla's been making electric cars with air quotes self-driving and driver assist for a long time. And suddenly out of nowhere they unveil that they're going to be making this like humanoid robot.

And they show this like sleek slender like black and white robot with like a head and shoulders and fingers and feet and everything. And we're like, how did we get here? How is Tesla suddenly going to be a robot company? So if you think about it, if you go back a little bit, Elon basically said on stage, Tesla is essentially one of the largest, if not the largest, robotics companies in the world, if you want to frame it like this.

And of course, this is AI Day, and this is a recruiting event, and obviously they're talking a lot about the way they do things in computer vision and AI. But I can kind of see it, because if you describe a Tesla as a semi-sentient robot on wheels navigating around the world using its sensors, mostly cameras. It kind of makes sense. Okay. It's one version. Self-driving cars is one version of applied robotics and AI and computer vision.

So, okay, cool. So they make a lot of, they make a bunch of these robots and they happen to be in the forms of what we call cars. But this next form factor of a robot is going straight to humanoid robot and they really landed hard on this one sentence i kept hearing over and over again which is that this robot will be able to do things that are dangerous repetitive or boring to humans and lots of other questions were asked by the way of them on stage, like Elon and some of the fellow engineers on stage talked about the dojo chip and talked about the way Tesla's

compute with the self-driving computer and the way they're going to be doing supercomputers and learning in the future. And a lot of they had the robot behind them on stage the whole time. So a lot of the questions were like model of it. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the questions were like, hey, by the way, this robot's interesting. Why does it have to have 10 fingers? Like, what's the biggest challenge about this humanoid form? And like, do you think this is something that people are going to really want to deal with? Is there an emotional component to making it human shaped?

And they really confined their answers to, well, we'd like this to be able to do things that are dangerous, repetitive and boring to humans. And that's kind of all they said. And it the rest was left up to us to infer and look i'll be the first one to say i'm not a robotics expert a lot of people are like marquez you're way out of your lane talking about robotics i don't know i feel like i'm i'm in the tech space and this is a tech thing and i have feelings about it and on top of all this, we very recently did a Retro Tech episode, Retro Tech Season 2, all about humanoid robots. And I learned a lot about, I mean, obviously people have been around longer than me and have learned plenty about this, but about like the history of pop culture and people's obsessions with humanoid robots.

Just how many human robots you see in like from everything from Star Wars to like the Jetsons to like just everything future facing seems to include some sort of human shaped robot into like why we haven't gotten human shaped robots today. And a lot of what we found in all this research and all the interviewing I did and what eventually the episode sort of summarizes is that it turns out the human shape for a robot isn't necessarily the best shape for a robot to actually do things. And this is probably where the, I'm going to say, debate in air quotes comes up about form factor. So I'm curious, by the way, you've been quiet. What do you think about Tesla unveiling a human-shaped robot and saying,

by the way, there's probably going to be a prototype late next year? How does that make you feel? I mean, you just basically asked the question that this whole episode is going to be about. I have a lot of thoughts on it. I've tried to turn this episode into, it is going to be a rant ramble episode. I hope you're all ready. It is only going to be about Tesla bot today because we have a lot of thoughts on it. It's hard to kind of break it all down because there's so much that they announced by not announcing very much. Yeah. Like it's I think the first thing I'm going to say is

the announcement seems extremely optimistic and I am very pessimistic about what they said. Interesting. But we're going to try and go through both parts of here fairly, as fairly as we can. And again, we're not experts. This is a lot of just our thoughts as tech people. But we have gotten to, like you said, you did the humanoid robot episode. We went and saw Boston Dynamics and Spot. And that whole day was fascinating. Very instructive.

Talking to all the people at Boston Dynamics was cool. They've done all this Atlas stuff recently. I hope we get to go back at some point and see that. But let's just start with, let's do the specs of what human or Tesla bot is. Yeah, so okay. It's, again, a very preliminary thing. They've given us this silhouette

of a sleek human form factor or whatever. Maybe it looks like that, maybe not. But they're saying it'll be about 5 foot eight, 125 pounds. So actually pretty lightweight considering all the motors and batteries and things you need to have in a robot. It seems super lightweight. Seems like it'd have to be some very lightweight materials to make a computer like that, that big and that powerful 125 pounds. But that's about a human dimension, five, eight, 125. Sure. It's all sleek white and it's got this

like black mesh as a head which kind of reminds me of like a like a home pod like as if it had like microphones and speakers at the top but they're hidden yeah i mean i think the best way to describe it is it looks like a person in a white you know those white spandex body suits kind of like the green screen suits and then it has almost like the Daft Punk helmet. It's like full black directly over its face, kind of down to your shoulders. I mean, it looks so much like it that they had this really cringey moment at one point where they brought this guy dressed like it

in a white body suit and a black head out. It was a lot more than a moment. It was a long time. It was way too long, to the point where even Elon was kind of, Elon, the king of terrible memes on Twitter, was cringing about it. He's like, all right, all right, we're done. No, but it's definitely a human shape.

It has 10 fingers. It has a five-mile-an-hour top speed, to which Elon commented, you should be able to run away from it, to which my response was, how long can it go five miles per hour? Because five miles an hour on a treadmill is pretty slow, but five miles an hour chasing you for hours. With unlimited endurance. Is a different story.

But he makes the point that you should be able to easily overpower it or run away from it. It's a friendly robot. Great. We'll just go with that. Sure. It can lift 10 pounds with its arms extended, or it can deadlift 150 pounds.

So it's got some lifting power for boring, dangerous human tasks. So essentially its arms aren't very strong, but its grip strength and leg strength are pretty good. Sure, yeah. If you can deadlift 150 at 125 pounds, not bad. Yeah, that's really soft. It's got the full self-driving computer inside. It's got a screen up at the front,

and it is just the closest thing to a humanoid robot that anyone's announced that they'll be able to do. Now, when they announced this, it's funny. You see this, like, cool, sleek-looking robot, and who knows if it actually looks like that. But when I saw this, two different things came to mind. One is Boston Dynamics Atlas, like that version of a humanoid robot, which is, like industrial incredible looking but very powerful and impressive super stocky it's only five feet tall but it is thick it has like a huge backpack on it's like it has no fingers it's just like balls like fists for hand i guess so yeah it's got like rubber yeah so i pictured that but then on the other side of the spectrum i picture like those sort of uh

dinky like ces you know how you go to ces and you see like a humanoid robot that like its only job is like to hand you like yeah like brochures or something yeah it's like like an hors d'oeuvres robot or like yeah there's one that remember there's one that like pulled out chairs or like move chairs around something like that scrabble or something like that yeah they're all just super clunky, and the only reason they look like a human is because they put eyes and a face on it. Exactly.

And that is the interesting part to me is because robots like that become unnecessarily complicated and difficult when they are human-shaped. Now, if I'm an optimist, I'm thinking, okay, an engineering company, a'm thinking, okay, an engineering company, a robotics company, a software company like Tesla should be able to make a really good general purpose human shaped robot. But as of right now, there's way more examples of the dinky

CES robot that can barely stand up, that can push in chairs. It's like, why didn't you just put it on wheels? Versus like Boston Dynamics Atlas, which is about as advanced and capable as I've seen any humanoid robot so far. Now, here's the thing that can separate Tesla. Just before we get into the form factor discussion, because I know that's the conversation we probably want to have. But the advantage to something like what Tesla's doing is in their AI and machine learning and training it. doing is in their AI and machine learning and training it. So right now, Tesla's cars are all mostly capable of self-driving. And the way they do this is they have cameras and sensors around the car, and they are taking in all this stimuli from their environment.

And it recognizes a lot of it because it's been trained and it has this database of information. And what it can do is navigate through that environment. So it sees the road, it sees the lines on the road, it knows where to be, but it also sees pedestrians and motorcycles and trucks and cones and traffic lights and stop signs. And it uses all this information and makes thousands of real-time decisions on the fly and is able to navigate through its environment. All of that decision-making and its results are uploaded to the point where that information can be used to train the next sets of Teslas that go through the same intersection.

Yeah. So Tesla making a humanoid robot with a general-purpose application, in theory, will be able to navigate and train itself and continue to be trained the more of them that are out in the world. So if this robot's going through Home Depot, the first time it might get it kind of right. But once it uploads that information, it's going to be able to learn from that and train it.

And that's going to come back down to the next robot that goes to Home Depot. And it's going to be better at that same task. That's the general idea to simplify. Yeah. And I think Tesla's AI is clearly fantastic when it comes to all the road stuff. Now, the biggest advantage to that is the way it can gather all the information on the roads is because a car is a thing that a person controls to start so they sold these cars that people are controlling while starting to gather the information on that which then they can continue to build on build on build on while people are

driving the cars and then as it gets further and further and further it's collecting more and more information yeah roads are also like there are tons of variables on roads, but generally a road is lined. It has very clear markers for things that you have to follow anyways because that's just how a road works. So now it has these very specific set of objects that it is going to react off of. Yeah, there's like rules.

Exactly. There's laws and there's like rules where if you tell something to go from point A to point B, your task is go from this place to this place, and your set of rules is your guidelines to getting there. Exactly. It literally has guidelines on how to make it to there. Yeah. So, you know, obviously the self-driving is one version of applied robotics and computer vision,

but I could see it. You can now say Tesla is a robotics company and this AI humanoid robot thing is understandable as an announcement from Tesla. The question I've had is, is it a good idea to make a humanoid robot? And are they so optimistic that they can make an efficient, useful robot in a human form to the point where that's a better idea than what I think is actually a better idea, which is application specific robots dedicated, dedicated for each task.

And that's my, that's been my toughest thing. I've seen a lot of really interesting comments, actually in the comment section of the videos and on Twitter, obviously I mentioned like, maybe I'm being short sighted here, but I'm open to hearing different versions of people's feedback and what they think it would be useful for. Grocery shopping was the number one example. Well, that's what Elon said, right? It was the example given on stage. Do you want to unpack that first, and then maybe later we'll take a couple other suggestions?

Yes. So it's an example of a task that is best achieved by the human form. Yep. So the couple examples I gave in the video were vacuuminging for example like a boring repetitive task yep instead of making a human shaped robot to push around a vacuum we turned the vacuum into a robot yep right we have the rumba same thing with the dishwasher i just you know obviously you can have humans put things into dishwashers, but instead of making a human shaped dishwasher, it's just the dishwasher is the robot. And so the more of these examples of tasks I would want to be taken over by robots that I could think of, the more I thought that thing should just be the robot. of the more I thought that thing should just be the robot.

And that's actually a better, more efficient way of doing it because a human-shaped dishwasher is constrained by the limits of the human form versus just making a machine specifically dedicated to cleaning dishes, and that's all it does. It'll do it better than any machine would ever do cleaning dishes. So going to the grocery store is an example where we're like, all right,

we have this whole world around us that is like designed by humans for humans. We've got doors and their handles are at like arm height and we've got like parking lots and we've got ramps and stairs. Shopping carts. Shopping carts are like this perfect application. It's just built for a human to use and then that's it. So maybe going to the grocery store and going shopping for food for you is an example where, okay, you'd want a humanoid robot to be able to do that. And maybe it can do some other things pretty well, but like that's one thing it does well. And the more I thought about that, the more I'm like, maybe you would just get a dedicated like set of robots to achieve that for you before a general purpose robot.

And obviously that's me being pessimistic about a general purpose humanoid shaped robot, the way it has to balance on two feet and walk around and be waterproof in case it rains and all these other form factors. It has to walk into the store, identify the things you want. How many times you go to the store and buy something you didn't even realize you were gonna get just based on your own instinct, that has to happen into the store, identify the things you want. How many times you go to the store and buy something you didn't even realize you were going to get just based on your own instinct like that has to happen with the robot.

There's a lot of other factors. But in theory, yeah, it could walk right in, push a shopping cart around. It's designed for the human form. Grab the things you want, put them in, check out, drive home, whatever it's got to do, and it could achieve that task in theory. In theory, yeah. Pretty cool. I don't know. Do you picture humanoid robots amongst people at ShopRite?

No. I think like, I mean, so my initial thought on that was, yes, I believe there's a way to automate that with a dedicated specific grocery shopping robot. I think it makes way more sense to have something that was on wheels that could go pretty much shelf to shelf, grab whatever product is on the shelf. I can see a robot having an issue with, I mean, it's 5'8". It's not the tallest robot in the world. I mean, that's pretty average height, but anything within the top two shelves that might be pushed back,

I can't imagine it reaching back there. You've got a ton of other issues in the sense of if something's out of stock, what does it do? Does it just continue to look for it the whole time? It's got to figure out what a human would do. Yeah. So my first thought was we have Amazon warehouses that are extremely automated at this point that know whether things are in stock beforehand, that know where to go pick stuff up and bring it to a central area where it gets boxed together. And then after thinking about that, someone had mentioned this Tom Scott video, which again, how many times can we reference this guy? He makes the best videos in the world. They're so informative. Uh, if you

ever want to be on the podcast, we'd love you. But he has this really, really cool video about this completely automated grocery store. It's essentially this giant warehouse. And if you can just imagine the center floor being like a chessboard just squares this huge grid yeah and essentially all of the groceries are underneath the grid and there's specific squares and these robots go on all the tracks and are it looks like this giant beehive almost so now they're going to all the different um i guess aisles i can. I don't know what the pods maybe. Yeah, it's like pods of stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Goes above it, reaches down, grabs how many items it needs out of it, brings it up into the robot, and now it has everything and can bring it to a centralized spot to then package all of it. I think they said by the time you order, it takes about five hours. But, I mean, maybe that's kind of long if you need groceries right away but that seems pretty efficient if you're booking stuff in advance and everything yeah it just seems to make way way more sense to have a dedicated bot doing all that then like you said if a humanoid robot does that it has to drive itself there maybe it gets into a car that

automatically drives but we're not at that point either yet. Well, yeah, that was my, sorry to interrupt. That was my one thing is like Tesla is already one of the companies that has made application-specific robots. If the goal is to have a robot drive you around, I didn't build a human-shaped robot to sit in the car that is clearly built for humans and hold the steering wheel and drive. No, the car is the robot. You get in the car, whatever you want to put in the car, the car itself is what's going to drive you from point A to point B.

It has the sensors, it has the capabilities, and that is the robot. So that's why I was thinking like, yeah, that's way better than having a human like try to fold itself into every different type of shaped car that exists in the world.

Yes, they're generally shaped the same and they're shaped for humans, but yeah, that's what really got exists in the world. Yes, they are generally shaped the same and they're shaped for humans. But yeah, that's what really got me on the question of like, all right, how useful is a general human-shaped robot? And there's also like the emotional aspect of it, which someone else asked, which was like, okay, you've made it human-shaped. Is this to elicit some sort of compassion

or make people less scared of it you know if you were in shop right and you saw a human shaped robot looking at cans of peaches versus if you saw like spot grabbing peaches like would that be better claw that like the snake arm claw yeah yeah or just something something eight feet tall so you reach the top shelf like would that be too much for people would they be more accepting of a human robot i think that goes into that's an argument i haven't even really thought of i i will be optimistic in the aspect that it is created as a humanoid because of the world we live in is based on human ergonomics and i totally like i'll i'll stay with their the emotional aspect i don't think that's i'm ready to unpack something like that. I think it has to be way more real to me

to like elicit enough of a response there. I don't think we have a humanoid robot that's real enough for me to wonder like that thing is a robot but looks like me. Yeah. How do I feel about this? Well, here's another one. How do you feel when you see,

you probably haven't seen this in person. We saw spot when we got to Boston dynamics and then we saw videos of spot, like walking around New York city. If you saw spot walking around New York city, is that too much? Is that weird? Can we, I want to use a different example than New York city because it was used by the NYPD and I don't. And I don't appreciate it really. So what if, because the whole point is it's supposed to be doing tasks that are like replacing either humans

or other people who would do that labor. So I'm trying to think of like another robot. So it was interesting because most of the spot things were in situations where humans wouldn't really be.

I mean, maybe the construction site ones where it's just going around and taking the same photos every day, surveying. But a lot of it, a lot of the applications have to do with remote work where it could be controlled from hundreds of miles away or dangerous work where humans wouldn't be something like nuclear power plant that maybe had a leak somewhere. Or I don't know if they have leaks, but you know what I mean? Like something where a human would be in danger at i think the

remote thing was a nice bonus because it was like all right there's a construction site going up and it's in some remote city you're managing the site instead of driving up there once every week and taking pictures of the same stuff to see how progress has gone you just sit at home with the controller and tell the robot to do it again and you can watch it go around it's like it's remote just because you can you can just have the robot there and you never have to send the robot home so yeah there's just uh there's a there's a lot of advantages to this sort of robots replacing typical labor stuff it's just a question of what's the best form factor for it uh i want to take a quick break we're going to come back and talk about the human shape because i think this is where it gets the most interesting and the most juicy and we can have the most fun

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All right, we're back. So let's talk, let's debate human-shaped robots versus non-human-shaped robots. So this is the number one comment I was trying to figure out from people because my short-sightedness is always coming to bite me. For one, I can only see smartphones as the end form factor. When they started folding in half i was like mind blown like i can i can't see them being injected into our arms or our brains i just can't i i'm so short-sighted so i only see the now so the other half of that is robots like i get that we want to make human

shaped robots and they seem really cool but like they don't seem ready anytime soon no not at all and so when i know that we have really, really good application specific robots and they're easier to design and create and code than a general purpose, amazing humanoid robot, I think we should do everything that way. That's just my, my intuition because of my lack of robotics degree and my short sightedness, but a lot of interesting comments going the other way. So I wanted to talk about that. I actually want to start, there was a pretty solid video that was tweeted at me of someone breaking down like a couple examples of why we should do humanoid robots. So I'm going to toss it to Adam. He can play that video. Hi guys. I want to do a very

quick video. I've just seen Marcus Brownlee's video where he's you know basically saying he doesn't agree with the approach of making the the Tesla bot humanoid now first of all Marcus is fantastic one of the greatest tech communicators on the planet so this isn't an anti Marcus video but I do totally disagree with him on this I'm on Elon side on this one surprise surprise so Marcus's argument was that you build application-specific robots, okay? And that could be true if you're building from the ground up.

If you're building a car factory, for example, absolutely, because everything is a flat surface. You've got an empty warehouse and you need to fill it with things. But we are talking about integrating a robot as possibly a human assistant into a world that has been designed over thousands of years to accommodate the human form. Okay, so the example he gave was he said,

the dishwasher is the robot that's been designed. Well, that's only half true because the dishwasher still needs a human to interact with it, okay? It'd be very difficult. You'd have to design some kind of machine that could take the dishes off the side or whatever, put them in the dishwasher in the right place. So clearly, most practically, the space between your counter and your dishwasher and all these things, it would need to have the dimensions of a human because your kitchen was designed for human.

Same with the washing machine. This is first principle stuff. Elon Musk has said, what's the best way to solve the most problems in one go? It's not to build an individual robot for every single tech application you have in your home to replace it. So you have to replace every single piece of tech. Or what you do is you work with what we've got and you build a robot in the form that is most compatible with your home. Because if you had wheels on the bottom of it, it could go up and down stairs, for example. And yes, it does have to fit in a car, which means it has to be able to bend like a human to fit in a car.

So the scenario may be that the robot hops into your Tesla one day. The Tesla, a robot itself, drives the robot to supermarket. The robot has to be able to get in and out of the car. Otherwise, you have to redesign cars. So this is the point, and this is why I disagree, and this is why I think the humanoid approach is correct thanks guys all right so i love that i love that we're actually getting constructive feedback this is the best part of like making youtube videos is

you immediately get like a breadth of different opinions and people who immediately have a thought and can give an opinion like that okay so i wanted to talk about these points for example just real quick um the the humanoid form thing is so interesting because he mentions like a dishwasher while it is a robot that washes the dishes it still needs a human to like load the dishwasher and i thought i was like okay that makes a lot of sense but what would be easier designing a robot or designing a dishwasher for that matter with like an arm inside that can reach out and like grab the dishes and put it in or designing an entire humanoid robot

that can do a ton of stuff including loading the dishwasher. That's my question. I think quick, if I wanted to use the laundry version, I think I could find a solution to that a little quicker. The dishes one is a,

is kind of interesting. And I think what's funny is every time someone brings up the dishwasher scenario is they don't know where the dishes are getting taken from. Cause it's like, well, we have to put them from the sink into the dishwasher. Well, who put them in the sink?

Well, then we have to put them from the table to the dishwasher. Well, who set the table? Like it just like, it keeps going back and back into these more mundane and mundane tasks that I guess kind of like does make sense for the humanoid robot but i still not fully sold on it but for laundry let's say yeah there's people are saying the clothes don't need to make it into the

laundry machine i think the easiest way for that is like your hamper at that point now has some sort of chute that goes straight to the laundry, to the washing machine. And then that washing machine can transfer to the dryer. Or, I mean, I could totally see, and they might already have this, a two-in-one washer dryer. That's going to come way before a humanoid robot can pick my clothes up off the floor. I saw that at CES. And at a certain point, that's everything right there.

Unless you want the robot to take my clothes off of me and put them in the laundry, which I will put my foot down right there. Somebody wants that. Somebody wants that. So I could see maybe there are people who have trouble, that have disabilities, where that could be a thing. There's probably an arm connected to your bed or something that could do it better than that. Dishes, yeah, I agree. connected to your bed or something that could do it better than that. Dishes, yeah, I agree.

It's a tougher scenario, but I also think in all of these cases, we're being extremely optimistic about being able to have a humanoid robot that's controlling it. I think so. I think one thing to talk about, while our world is set up for human-sized things, I still don't always necessarily know if that means. Exact human. I think something with potentially four legs has a better balance scenario, different types of arms, fingers might not always be the best and, uh, the best for

it. I don't think human always makes the most sense for all those. And probably a lot of those could be done and be done better with something like spot and an arm or something like that yeah lots lots of thoughts on i mean really the question might also there's so many versions of this but like which side which side do you want to attack the problem at from do you want to attack it from the end task side or from like the human side but the other thing that he mentions is uh let's say you want it to go grocery shopping for you it has to drive your car to the grocery store.

So it has to be able to fit in a car. So it has to be human-shaped to get in the car, which is true if you don't have a self-driving car. But if you do have a Tesla, the Tesla drives itself. So you don't need a human-shaped robot. It can fit in the trunk, and then the car drives itself. So anyway, there's lots of back-and-forth conversation i would like to have but obviously sure let's imagine that right there where we've already proved that there is a way you can do a automated grocery store you don't even need the robot if your car can drive itself if we're at that if we're assuming it's at that point where

it can drive itself already it can just pull up and pop the trunk and then the automated grocery store is the one loading it into your trunk. Exactly. Or, you know, shipping. Yeah. So now the grocery store is the robot or the FedEx truck's the robot. So there's a bunch of different versions of this,

but I figured we'd make it a little more interactive for this. So what we're going to do, we just actually completed, is we opened up a Discord stage event and we had you guys who are in our Discord server talk to us about this exact question is the human form factor for a robot a good idea and we got a lot of really interesting responses this is the back and forth i was after so i'm glad we got to record it

just a little asterisk this is on discord so this is discord audio it's just a bunch of people talking to their computers bear with us on that but also uh it goes really well and there's some really fun there's some questions and answers yeah it went way further than i was ever expecting and ended up yeah it got completely derailed crisis level yeah it's fantastic so without any further ado here's the discord stage event uh jay basco 18 I just invited you on stage if you want to talk about your comment. Hello. How's it going? Good. How are you? Sorry if my audio sucks.

That's no problem. It's discredited. How's it going? What's your idea? How are you feeling? What's your idea? How are you feeling? Yeah, I was just thinking about what you said about that you don't see the robot going to pick up groceries anytime soon. But I was thinking that maybe, you know, for that old generation, our grandparents or something, maybe it could be useful for them to maybe, you know, not having them to get up to pick up the mail or, you know, simple stuff that, you know, sometimes it's not as simple for these old folks, you know. Yeah, so I like, I think one of the interesting versions of this that I heard was, like, going to the grocery store or going to pick up the mail, like you said. And I do think almost all of those tasks could be accomplished with not quite a human-shaped robot, but probably more of, like, a small, like, box on wheels with an arm attached to it, basically. And the question is, do we want it to be human-shaped because it's friendlier or people will be more accepting of it?

Are we willing to put in more engineering money and dollars to make it balance on two legs, basically? Because I think you could get away with grocery shopping with just a WALL-E robot. Right. Not even a robot, but maybe a person that you can hire. You know, you don't need that IE technology to do those tasks. But yeah, for sure.

I don't see why it has to be human-shaped at all. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, even I think the argument for a robot would be it's cheaper. Like you buy the robot once instead of having to pay a salary, you know. So I get that people want to automate that or give it to a robot. I'm just trying to find a good reason for it to be human shaped. Right. Even though maybe we don't need them now, I guess someone had to do it.

And who better than, you know, Elon Musk to be the first with the idea? That's fair. Well, we'll look forward to it. We'll see how it goes. Thanks for the comment. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Yeah.

All right, HR7. Cool. What's up, dude? Yeah, hey, can you hear me? Yeah, what's going on? Hey, I'm fine. Yeah, so I was thinking like the entire world, like we have an entire world that's created for the human shape. Like all of the facilities, everything is like, it's designed for the human aesthetic. So if you want robots that can do anything and everything, you would have to build a world around it. So rather if the robot is already in a humanoid shape, we already have it.

So it might be easier for a wider purpose rather than one specific use case. Yeah, so I keep going back to trying to find good examples, right? So one example we kept going back to was a grocery store example. Like doors are at the perfect height for a human to pull the handle. And like a shopping cart is the perfect size thing for a human to push around on wheels. And it's a valid point. Like, do you need to redesign the whole grocery store? Or do you design a humanoid robot to fit into that human shaped task and i actually think maybe it's a hot take but i think we'd be it would be easier

to make a robotic grocery store instead of designing an incredible human-shaped robot. Is that crazy? Yeah, but like, okay, like for example, you mentioned that we don't have a humanoid robot that does the vacuum. You have a robot, a vacuum that's, it itself is a robot. So, but suppose you want a robot that's a vacuum and a dishwasher and can do your clothes and can tidy up and like a bunch of stuff. So rather than have different robots that can do all of that one single humanoid robot may be able to do that since the ecosystem is already there yeah i actually think it was it would be totally fine to have a bunch of robots i think it would be actually probably a little more efficient economically and physically to have a dedicated like it sounds crazy like wow

you'd now you'd have like a hundred robots in your house and that's crazy to have a hundred robots for a hundred tasks but we're already kind of there like you have a dishwasher you have a you have a washer you have a dryer maybe one day that's one robot but like that's two robots right now you might have a vacuum robot you might have a microwaving robot You might have a microwaving robot. You might have a TV robot that transfers the signal into an image. We have a bunch of computers. Even my thermostat right now is a robot. And there's probably some tasks out there that could be turned into robot tasks in the future, but those could also be robots.

At that rate, wouldn't every single appliance manufacturer, anyone who makes any device, would have to become a robotics company? Would they have the tech for that? Yeah, good question. I think we're actually surprisingly close. And I think we're closer to Samsung making a robotic washer that can actually take the clothes out of your hands and do the whole

job for you than we are to, you know, Boston Dynamics Atlas, like putting clothes in the dishwasher or in the washer. True. Yeah. But yeah, you know, we'll keep an eye on it. But that's a that's a good that's a very common comment I saw on like on the YouTube comments on Twitter, like, do we really want 500 robots in our houses and i don't know we might be closer than we think but thanks for your question thank you take care

i think there's an interesting aspect in there of like jack of all trades master of none um yes a single humanoid robot can probably do a whole mess of things but i do agree with you that like a bunch of tiny individual i mean we're calling them robots but like we said our house right now has stuff like that it has a dishwasher has a washer and dryer a thermostat like nobody's downstairs like i said shoveling coal or you know distributing oil and making sure all the temperatures are correct it's kind of like that already i just don't think we see it because we don't think of it as a specific robot and then a single human robot

trying to do all these different things, to me feels like that's a mighty, mighty task to accomplish when we have so many things that do all of those already. Yeah, Tom Scott had a really great point. He made a video about actually a grocery store robot, a robotic grocery store. And it was super interesting, but actually one of the best points in that video, besides the fact that, oh my God, you can make a grocery store robot, is the fact that humans don't really see robots until they're roughly human-sized.

And so you might see a bunch of little robot shopping carts rolling around and think, wow, that's like 150 robots. But really, the entire grocery store is one robot with 150 different little arms inside doing work. And so when you think about like, do I really want 100 different robots in my house doing a whole bunch of different things? Another way of thinking about that, or at least just framing that is your house is one robot that is doing a bunch of things for you already your house you know you think about a thermostat like instead of uh a bunch of different objects coming together

and like pressing the buttons on a thermostat to change the temperature you can have the temperature automatically be changed by a robotic thermostat we're doing air quotes um inside the same house where it you know washes the dishes for you and dries them and dries your clothes and like there's all these things that happen inside the house already so maybe it's uh maybe it's just one big robotic house instead of a humanoid robot walking around inside it smart house if anyone remembers the old disney channel original movie that uh this goal's right there. Can it update? Would you I'm gonna invite you to speak if you want to come on.

Cannot update. I can't believe I said that incorrectly. That is a very simple word. Hey what's up? Pretty good Mark. So my question was like recently we almost lost the Hubble telescope because we did not have we don't have a human program like a space shuttle program that can take us to any satellite so Hubble was designed to be maintained and upgraded and we don't have the

replacement quite up so could these robots something like a SpaceX Tesla robot be a good option because you could technically there won't be enough latency so you could technically control it by people on the ground and it would have similar joints as humans so in that kind of a situation, would it be a good option to have a humanoid essentially instead of Spot doing it? That's a really good question. I'm going to ask you a follow-up question, because I'm not as familiar with this.

But when you say we almost lost the Hubble telescope, is it because there were things that had to be performed in person by a human on the telescope? Is it because there were things that had to be performed in person by a human on the telescope? So what essentially happened was, Hubble telescope has redundancies in it. And the power unit in there is the one that is active now is the one that is the redundant one and it is fairly common for the power supply and stuff to fail on there because nothing is designed like most of the things are not designed to stay in space forever so now we are on the last or the last fail safe in on the hubble telescope so if somebody were to ship a power supply up, it would have to be linked

to the existing circuitry. And then that would become the redundant or the failsafe for the one that is already in use. If that makes sense. No, it does. That makes a lot of sense. And I think that's like the, I guess the general question would be, okay, now that we know we have this task that we need to complete, and from what I understand, the Hubble Space Telescope is pretty old. I mean, it's been out there for a while, but would it be a better use of resources to modify and improve the telescope itself, or to design a functioning humanoid robot to go up there and continue to maintain its current design and that's good that's not a question i have an answer to just i'm not as

familiar with obviously the telescope i know it's it's been out there for a long time and it's probably our most important most famous telescope but i wonder like uh you know the the general question coming down to like do you want to redesign the old thing to work better in a more robotic way or do you want to design a new robot to continue using the old thing built to be used by humans so hubble was like a more recency bias kind of an example. However, like once the James Webb telescope gets active, that is a telescope that would not be in Earth orbit. It would be in a Lagrange point.

So fairways away from the Earth. And for that, you won't be able to just like, and if you want that telescope to be active for like 15, 20 years, so you need somebody or something being willing to go to the Lagrange point, maintain it and come back or not come back kind of a thing. So do you think though that the humanoid form factor is the best to accomplish something like that? Or we see things like spot, which I mean, I don't know the exacts of robotics, but it seems like the two-legged arms and hands form factor

right now generally has a higher center of gravity and can't lift as many things. And Spot seems to be something that in general use kind of like one of its big things they sell it for is remote work. So somebody far away can accomplish stuff with the cameras and arms on it. So would something... Now, space adds a whole other aspect to this,

where maneuvering around space is obviously very different. But would there be something you think non-humanoid that would be more efficient in space being able to, you know, maybe almost like a spider robot that can grab onto the walls and everything and still have two arms that can be used remote to, like you said, replace this power supply and the wires, stuff like that? Or does a two-legged finger humanoid robot make the most sense here? The reason why I was thinking that the humanoid would be more easier in the early run would be if, say, there is less latency and you can have an electrician on planet Earth trying to control it, and then

you have one-to-one finger feedback for initial time being till you don't have smart robots that can do things on its own. So that is the only advantage. Do you think that could be accomplished? Sorry, sorry, I interrupted. Go ahead, go ahead. So it seems like the finger aspect is what you're most interested in here. And I totally agree. Like if it's like you said, one to one finger, I believe they have surgery robots that there's something very similar with that where you're essentially putting your hands into a glove and it's reacting.

But I mean, you can still put fingers and hands onto a robot with four legs or six legs or maybe something that has a better center of gravity, can grip onto different things with multiple other legs better and would still be considered designed specifically for that. Yes. So that is essentially where that was the only part where i said that this would be useful because mostly we've designed like spot as i gave the example spot would be useful in the longer run once it learns or anything so it was just like in this quick case scenario for the next five years that seems like could be an option but i do agree that a spot would be a better option because it is a more

refined concept of a moving structure yeah yeah i think and even in the future you know as we continue to make new telescopes that go further from earth and are less likely to want to send a human up to repair they should probably be designed to be remote repaired and not repaired by humans. Which is like a whole another story. I'm not about to sit out here and an armchair designed telescope but that's like another general thought is like okay we know these things are built to be operated by humans and then humans go up and repair them. But what if we just make them so we never have to do that again? Would that be better?

Yeah, that would be better. Yeah, so that is essentially what I was thinking about in the future. Great, awesome. Thank you for the insight. Appreciate it. No problems. Have a good one, you guys.

All right, real quick, let's take a quick break. We'll come back and we'll talk more about some robots. holidays brighter with all your Popeye's favorites. For just $25, you'll get four pieces of delicious Popeye's signature chicken, four tasty chicken tenders, four regular sides, and everybody's favorite, four buttermilk biscuits. Hurry up, though. Like the holiday season, Popeye's $25 festive family box deal will be over before you know it. Love that chicken from Popeye's. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone.

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See Uber app for details. Noah, I invited you up if you'd like to join. Hey, is my level good? It's fantastic. Great audio quality. Thanks, Mike audio mic oh thank you it's a blue spark digital um nice yeah so for hot takes i mean one of the hottest takes for robotics is you know being able to replace jobs and tesla's doing things like with uh tesla semi right it's being able to replace a driver potentially with its whole AI self-driving and that driving trucks is one of the largest markets in the USA. And so if you think about it, there's also a lot of jobs that require not too much thinking tasks, but a lot of tasks with

like using your hands and walking around, like say serving tables at a restaurant or like helping out the disabled people in a hospital, right? So for any of those tasks, which are quite a few, and there's just anyone that doesn't require a lot of thinking, but a lot of, you know, just general interacting with objects, I think a bot that's designed like a human would be able to fit that role very well, since, you know, the world is designed for humans it's not designed for a dog yeah so i like this this is interesting so the one is uh i kind of like the like waiting tables uh example where let's say because in theory like all a robot has to do if

it's waiting tables is it needs to collect your orders it needs to carry the plates out and back and clean the tables and stuff like that and it could be shaped like a human but it could also be shaped like like wally or like a box on wheels with three arms and it could probably accomplish the same thing and i wonder is it human shaped because that makes it more easy to understand or it's friendlier for people if you're in a restaurant and you sit down and there's a human shaped robot you know that it's taking your order versus if it's a box you don't know what's happening is that like the main advantage i mean that is one part of it because we've seen you know when the tesla robot came out

we saw people referencing movies like the terminator Oh, here's this evil robot that's going to come kill us all. But another famous movie is Big Hero 6, where you have a human-shaped robot that's one of the main characters. One of the big advantages is that you're able to empathize with it. So I think that is a big factor, having a robot that people can empathize with or even feel comfortable having it in a room. I think another example would be data from the old Star Trek movies or TV shows. But the other part of it is just that we are in a world designed for humans. Every object from the doorknob to the stairs is made for a human to be able to interact with. So I think having a human-shaped robot,

while we might not be able to think of any single example, having something that, if you wanted a robot that could adapt to any situation when it comes to just general day-to-day activities, then I think a human-shaped robot would be ideal for that. Yeah, I think a key word you used was adapt. So I remember when I was talking to Elon in the interview we did, I put the clip in the video, actually, where we were talking about the factory and like, what are some things that robots do in the factory versus like what humans are doing? Because there's still humans working in the factory.

And the example he gave was like, oh, you know, maybe just connecting two hoses together. And so there might be a hose on the left and a hose on the right and they tell the human to connect them and they just grab one grab the other put them together and a robot's like decent at that once but then if the next time the hoses are in different places the human just knows to grab them again and the robot needs to like figure it out again yeah and i wonder like what level of adaptability is possible from these like impressive machine learning computer vision enabled robots that tesla's building and can they actually be like how hard is it going to be to make them as good as a real human because i love the idea but it seems like that is equally

as difficult as redesigning parts of the world we live in yeah and i think the solution or the the answer to that question, which none of us are going to be able to say for now, relies more on the software of the robot rather than the hardware. Like Tesla's building one of the largest super cute computers in the world just for AI. And once they solve self-driving, what will they be able to train the AI on? Could you create something that could say, hey, Google, make me a cup of coffee? will they be able to train the AI on? Could you create something that could say, hey, Google, make me a cup of coffee? Would we be able to do that? I don't know, but it will be very interesting to see that in the future. Yeah. Do you think about how many variables there are in

the real rest of the world versus self-driving? Because this was one of the things that came up in our talks was like, all right, driving a car, there there's a road there's lines on the road and then there's maybe like a dozen things you're going to encounter a bunch of times like there's other cars there's trucks motorcycles bikes pedestrians stop signs street lights and then you kind of like you've kind of done it you solve self-driving but in and make me a coffee you know there's there's one task you recognize the coffee and there's a bunch of things there but then there's like hey grab my headphones downstairs does it know what headphones are does it need models of that and then it's hey go grocery shopping and there's just this massive list of way more stuff to learn and you know if i

can do it it's probably Tesla, but I just, I'm curious if that's a factor. Yeah. And I think the thing about, we'll be able to identify my products. I think that's something that we're already seeing these programs being able to solve. Cause if you go into, like, if you look at what AI is doing, and you go into Google or anything, you could say, give me a picture of a cat. And there's AI that will actually be able to give you pictures of cats that have not been taken ever. We could say, here's a picture of a sunny beach.

So to say that there's an AI that could say, hey, get my headphones, and it would be able to know what your headphones are and be able to identify them. I think that's something that we already have. But on the matter of how hard is it to do day-to-day activities versus how hard is it to drive a car? I kind of wish that I knew more about AI just to answer that question because it's like every one of us humans is able to do human things easily, yet we need to train and get a license to drive a car. So does that mean that driving a car is more difficult than walking down a set of stairs?

Or does that just mean that we're really good at walking down sets of stairs and pretty terrible relatively at driving cars? And I don't know, but I'm really excited to see what happens because, you know, AI wasn't really a thing that normal people could access what 10, 20 years ago. And now we already have things that are able to generate images, to find objects and self-drive your car. So, you know, 15 years from now, it's going to be pretty swell. Yeah. I like the optimism. I think that's the best, the best way to look at it is like, we've gotten this far. And it's funny, like there's even still some cases where I'll like ask Google Lens what type of sneaker I'm looking at. And it's like, that's a blender. And I'm like, no, not at all. But yeah, it is really inspiring. Yeah, it's inspiring when it gets it right. So I like the optimism, Noah. Thank you. And I like your videos, I must say.

Thank you. Appreciate that that thanks for coming up yeah no worries have a great day uh don't forget to drink water good call oh good call i'm kind of nervous noah's gonna take my job uh thank you very much i i think we have one one more all right i have one more somebody in here said let's see i have mind-blowing thing you should hear no one has ever thought about for a humanoid robot so i think i can't not invite this person up to talk so let's uh we're gonna do our last one here i think because we need to this is all going to go into the podcast um and we talk about a lot of stuff before and we will talk about a lot of stuff before,

and we will talk about a lot of stuff after. So we can't do too, too many. But specified null, I'm going to invite you up. These are big shoes to fill. No one's ever heard about it. So let's see. Hello. Thanks for inviting me.

How's it going? Can you hear me? Is it clear? It's good. Thanks. So I had a really great idea that I have been thinking about for a while. And that is, okay, let me put it this way. Our bodies are kind of a transport for our heads.

Basically, we live in our heads. So now we can transplant arms, limbs, arms or legs. We can transplant hearts, but not yet entire bodies. So I would say this is a great experiment that if this robot can walk properly, can navigate, can do everything that we can do, and then at some point, let's say we get old, we get 90 years old, our body's old, but not our brain. Our brain still works. If we could somehow do like a surgery

that removes our head without us dying and put it on a robot that can, you know, pump blood to our brain, give us food. We don't have to eat, actually. We don't have to drink. So the robot does everything. We just charge it and give it like supplies. So it supplies food and water to our brain.

And then we can walk. We can navigate the world and we can change our bodies just like the movies. can walk we can navigate the world and we can change our bodies just like the movies but like this is required just like the cars they need to drive a lot around the cities and town to learn we need a robot learn how to navigate the world we need a robot that can do that and then we can transplant yes this is for the future like maybe the next hundred know, 10, 20, 50 years that we can actually get bodies for our brains. Because basically our body is a transport for our heads. Like we eat to supply food to it, and then we have legs to walk, we have hands to do things. Basically we only need our brain.

Man, that is a very valid point. Our body is a transport vehicle for our brain. Our brain is the most important organ, according to the brain, anyway. No, I'm with you. Okay, so here's another question then. So you need to somehow connect the brain and all of the systems, the breathing system, the blood and the oxygen going to the brain and everything so that all you need to do is just charge it um what did you forget to charge well okay so

basically that's where Neuralink comes in place Neuralink helps the brain to connect to computers so you can you know control your arms your, even you can replace your eyes, have high resolution eyes. You can see further. You can see anything. You can see your emails. You don't even need a phone. You can literally connect to the world. And for the food part, basically, the robot needs two supplies. One is charging for the batteries. The other supply is like, imagine having a small sack of balls that one of them is oxygen, the other is food. So you just put it in and then it will have a supply of oxygen for months for your brain. And you can choose what you want to eat for your brain today.

You can like insert something that will pump that food and oxygen and supplies and nutritions to the blood. That is a small stream of blood just goes to the brain and Recycles it and clean so you don't actually probably need to breathe anymore, I guess What about a what about a nervous system because I'm with you on like okay attach my brain to a humanoid robot What about like feeling things like I can move my hands and I can pick things up But can you still are there enough sensors out there is the tech good enough to replace a nervous system well at the moment probably not we don't know much about the brain but I'm sure Elon what he's doing with the neural link if he can successfully connect the entire brain

interface to the body including controls and sensation feelings vision hearing everything we probably just could take the brain out, not the head. Just the brain in a safe container, like in the head, or it could be anywhere in the humanoid robot, maybe in the chest. And we can go anywhere because we are a brain that is connected to, you know, our bodies to take us around. We probably could do that. Okay, so you've heard

the simulation argument where, like, if you advance technology sufficiently far enough into the future, our simulations get so good that they're indistinguishable from reality and we may or may not be in a simulation already. Do you ever think about

this as a future argument for this? Like, are we already humanoid robots? Are we already there? Do we do it already? We could think about this all day. There could be another world. We could be in a simulation or not, but it doesn't matter. What matters is the reality we are in.

Either we are in a simulation or not, and there's no way probably to prove it, but that's okay. What matters is we look in the future and what we can do for the humanity, right? What we can do to improve. And what is the most important thing is our lifetime, and it's limited, right? People have thousands of years have been trying to extend human life, but nobody could have done that until today. We have the technology. It's just a little bit, we're almost there. We just need to understand the brain and be able to connect it to our bodies. And at that point, it's important, like you said, it's important that we go to the right direction. We don't go to a matrix and

stuck all the people into a computer. We have to build a better world and that's where it starts today, I believe. I agree. We are so far off topic and I love it. It's great. Thank you for the thousand foot view. I think that was a useful way to

probably end this. Don't worry, I'm glad that it was useful. Yeah, I'm going to be thinking a lot about whether or not I would like my brain to be connected someday to a sufficiently advanced robot with the right technology. Yeah, sure. Because, you know, our minds probably only see the current situation. We see the robots as they are. We need a vacuum robot. We need robots for grocery shopping. But what we don't see is the far future, the next 10, 20, 50 years from now or a decade.

So that's the future we're building towards. And we have to be able to, you know, imagine or visualize what's going to be the world in 100 years. And another use case scenario, just remember, is like as of right now, before we get our limbic bodies, robotic bodies, we can use these humanoid robots to learn to navigate, you know, disasters, earthquakes, hazards. No robot could, you can't send a vacuum robot there to save people. But this humanoid robot can. It can drive a fire truck immediately. Like, we need help. All the people are down. Everybody needs help. So it can drive cars. It can drive a fire truck immediately. Like we need help. All the people are down.

Everybody needs help. So it can drive cars. It can take you. Not all cars are self-driving. Not all hospitals have equipment that can be controlled by computers. We need those people to take care of people at hospitals or people that people need care.

You know, we need people, old, people that people need care you know we need people old elderly they need care like it's not just all robots can do all their needs for them we need someone that can care for them help them in case of emergency they need to go to hospital all right sure let's let's go pick up the car keys i'm gonna drive you to hospital that that robot's gonna do for you gonna save your life yeah i think that the one thing i see in that is like that sort of makes the humanoid robot a a middle like a stop gap in between technology of the future like you say like obviously hospitals today aren't all robotic and cars and fire trucks and ambulances today are not self-driving. So until they are, we should make a sufficiently advanced humanoid robot

that can fill the gap of things humans can't quite do until we get to that better day where all the ambulances are self-driving. And we can send a WALL-E-shaped robot into the rubble of a disaster to help save people. We need this in-between. And if we get the humanoid robot right quickly, then it can fill a gap until tech of the future is amazing. Sure, exactly, exactly. And until then, hopefully this robot will be able to walk and navigate the world just like humans, just like Tesla cars can drive now, they can navigate. Until that day, probably those robots will be able to do most of the things and then,

hopefully by then, a Neuralink will be able to link our brains to them so we can actually walk, or we could be at home and control a humanoid robot remotely. So we could be anywhere in the world, we can connect to any one of them and experience the world just as it is. We could be anywhere in the world. We can connect to any one of them and experience the world just as it is. Perfect. I might be being controlled from home right now. Who knows?

Awesome. Hey, thank you so much. Thanks for chiming in. We appreciate that. I think that's where we'll end it for now. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Have a good one.

You too. Have a good one. Take care. All right. Thanks. All right. Well, that was incredible. I think that's what

we're gonna probably cut it that was a nice existential way to end this i want before everyone leaves this discord room i want everyone right now wherever you're sitting to picture that you are just a remote controlled human shaped robot being being controlled by someone else somewhere you are ready player one i just want everyone to have that that vision right now look down at your own hands is it real what's even real anymore all right well that went better than expected didn't know i don't know if i expected to look down at my own hands questioning reality, but I ended up doing that because maybe I am a humanoid robot after all. Wow, human after all is a song by Daft Punk,

which is the robots. Dang, that is deep. Whoa. There's no such thing as a coincidence. Whoa, okay. Well, anyway, I think just to put a bow on this, the last thing that made headlines from Tesla's AI day when they talked about this robot,

we did get Elon saying there might be a prototype by the end of next year. I think he said, that's what he said, 2022. Now, for anyone who's ever heard Elon announce a date on stage, we already are just going to go ahead and assume that that's not happening. Not at all. But, you know, seeing what we know about these CES robots and what we know about Boston Dynamics Atlas, if you were betting, when do you think you would see realistically a Tesla built humanoid robot that learns its way around the world and

is actually somewhat useful and also like doesn't fall over that's like that people are using to actually accomplish tasks and it's doing things by itself like you ask it to do something and it does something yeah because you know i mean even at the base level i will be dead by the time that yeah i mean we don't know what coming out means like i i assume we want this to be so like that could literally be anything sure yeah it could just be a prototype to have somewhere like a model the tesla rose is a prototype too like whatever but like eventually it's gonna come out and does that mean it's gonna be a retail purchase for humans like you'll be able to buy one for your own house i have no idea where we're going with this particular robot but when do

you think we'll see a functional functional humanoid robot that does some of this stuff if i'm taking so like can we agree at we've said it already atlas is the closest thing we've seen to you and i have seen right it's the most advanced humanoid shaped robot i've seen yeah and it is not even a fraction of what this tesla bot seems to want to accomplish it's not as graceful It is not really it doesn't have fingers. It's much shorter. It's much stockier like that would not fit into a car It's much louder. Yeah, it's it's basically mostly Running around it. So I mean even Boston Dynamics I don't think it's called it anything other than research and development like as far as I know They don't have a specific plan for it. Yes, not coming out and that is

You know, they've been in the game way longer than Tesla has in terms of the actual building of robots. We all agree Tesla's AI and software is fantastic and like totally makes sense for something like this. But if I were betting, like I said, I'll be dead by the time Tesla bot comes out and is doing, you know, if it goes for sale for sale and people are actually buying it. I mean, yeah, I can't imagine. This is something that has to fully rely on it. Tesla cars, when they release full self-driving and stuff and people are paying for it, the car still works as a car in that process. This robot can't be used for anything unless it's working in that scenario. So it has to be fully fleshed out at that point. At least 50 years.

I hope I'm still alive in 50 years. I think we land on Mars before we get the robots working to an acceptable level, but I don't think that's 50 years out. I think that's closer than that. So I think this is kind of an interesting thing you mentioned about stopgap robots is we're so far out of this

do we have the technology for it to to be a stopgap robot or are we further along in all the other technologies to be have these more individual automations before yeah the the humanoid robot is doing all of them i think that's the that's the best thing that i got out of this with all of our conversations we've had about the robots and with all of our back and forths and the Discord stage room and the comments on Twitter and the videos. I think the best thing that I see from these robots

is if we can make a pretty good general purpose robot, whether it's human shaped or not, let's ignore the human shape, just a pretty good general purpose robot um i think that robot would be pretty useful as a stop gap between when we actually get everything else to be robots so we were talking about like obviously you want to be able to drive a fire truck into a forest fire and be able to like put something out from the middle and you don't want to send a human in there but since forest since um fire trucks aren't self-driving you need something else to drive the

truck like before before that is a self-driving fire truck maybe there is a humanoid robot driving it and that's like my general self-driving fire truck way before a humanoid robot can do it because we have self-driving i mean that's true we basically have self-driving cars already that's and then for a fire truck listen that i have a lot of family members who are firefighters it's very hard but like in general you could probably have a fire truck that has a hose attached to it that's that's controlled also by the same sensors and stuff there's way more to it than that but i still just don't think the humanoid robot is coming and doing the job of a firefighter or driving a fire truck. Yeah.

Stuff like that. I think the aspiration is really admirable. Oh, yeah. Like people picturing it as like waiting tables at a restaurant or like just doing simple things for the elderly like collecting the mail and bringing them the milk from the delivery outside. Like very simple. You can't talk about humanoid robots and also still talk about getting milk delivered to your doorstep simple stuff like different worlds i'm just saying you just in this world where we wanted to do very simple basic things for sure

having one robot just to go get the mail is maybe less desirable than having one general friendly human-shaped robot that does a bunch of these everyday tasks. Um, and so I think if that is the aspiration of something like Tesla bot, cool. I hope I'm optimistic. I, at least I want it to go well. I'm not necessarily betting on it going well, but I'm hopeful that we do get something like that, uh, to actually be friendly and useful. Maybe when we're old, we will revisit this if it comes out and you and I are elderly and need help getting our laundry picked up and mail taken and we'll come back.

We'll do another podcast episode on it. If the Tesla bot comes out before 2030, then I will- I will let it slap me across the face yeah same I will tell it to slap me across the face to its face that's about it that's where we're going to end it this was a wild episode if you're this far kudos to you thank you for listening

appreciate you that was a lot we'll be back next week I'm sure there's a lot more tech coming out I mean it's that time of year. It's going to happen. So yeah, stay tuned for that. See you guys in the next episode. Definitely subscribe to the studio channel,

to the Clips channel, and to the main MKBHD channel while you're at it. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace. Waveform was produced by Adam Alino. We are partnered with Studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Vane Silk.