Elon Musk unveils Tesla Bot, an AI-powered friendly humanoid robot

Tesla Bot

At Tesla’s AI Day event, Elon Musk revealed that the electric car and solar power business is developing a humanoid robot prototype – Tesla Bot, that he thinks will one day replace human jobs.

Musk added that Tesla is effectively becoming a robotics firm as a result of its work with artificial intelligence and fully self-driving cars, because what else is a completely self-driving car but a “robot on wheels,” according to Musk, who spoke at an event designed to recruit AI engineers.

AI Researcher to Join Tesla

It’s unclear whether Musk and Tesla are serious about getting into the humanoid robots game. Humanoid robots face a variety of obstacles that wheeled robots do not, thus it may be best to leave them to Boston Dynamics.

Still, the event of Tesla Bot was intended to lure artificial intelligence researchers and engineers to join Tesla, thus enticing them with the chance of working on a humanoid robot might persuade a few people who otherwise would not have joined Tesla to join Tesla instead of Google.

What’s Elon thinking?

And it’s not like Elon Musk isn’t already thinking about the End of Work, the classic Keynesian idea of a 15-hour workweek (or fewer) thanks to rapid technological advancements.

To his credit, Musk isn’t claiming that the world is full of lazy peasants who whine about being hungry or seeking better pay, or that robot workers don’t whine.

However, this is a corporation that has been beset by anti-union claims, including the dubious circumstances surrounding the termination of hundreds of employees at one facility, including a substantial number of pro-union organisers, following an “annual review.”

Retaliation against Tesla Bot

The National Labor Relations Board recently determined that Tesla improperly retaliated against at least one employee for organising a union, and Musk was forced to remove a tweet insinuating that Tesla would take away stock options if employees voted to unionise, which was a violation of US labor law.

So, while Musk and Tesla haven’t always been the best allies of the common worker, does Tesla Bot imply that Musk is assembling a robot army to serve as slave labor? Yes, that is exactly what he is suggesting, but he claims it is for the greater good of humanity, so we’ll have to take his word for it for the time being.