Musk: Its for “work people would least like to do.”

At Tesla’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) first AI Day held on Thursday, showman Elon Musk gave the world a glimpse of the Tesla Bot, a humanoid bot that could ultimately perform those tasks that human least like to do. You’re forgiven to imagine that an actual humanoid came on stage – no, it was just an actor in a body suit resembling the robot. (MarketWatch)

The vision for a humanoid bot

“We’re also good at sensors and batteries and we’ll probably have a prototype next year that looks like this,” Musk said after the actor’s histrionics, commenting that Tesla is effectively already the world’s biggest robotics company.

“We’re making the pieces that would be useful for a humanoid robot, so we should probably make it. If we don’t, someone else will — and we want to make sure it’s safe,” Musk said.

His ultimate vision is for the bot to perform humdrum tasks and drive labour costs down enough to transform the global economy. It might even make physical labor “a choice,” and be the precursor to universal basic income.

“It’s intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate through a world of humans, and eliminate dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks,” Musk said.

Tesla Bot

The Tesla Bot is 5’-8” in height, has a screen for a face, weighs in at 125 pounds and moves at about 5 mph.

Musk humorously said the bot was slow enough that people could run away from it, and small enough to be overpowered by a human being.

Optimus, as the robot is currently code-named, works on the same AI chips and sensors that Tesla incorporates into its cars to enable autonomous driving.

Tesla’s AI Day is primarily intended to be a recruitment event at which the company shows off its flamboyant technology to attract new recruits for machine learning and AI.

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