Elon Musk is at it again and this time around he has said something that will ruffle many feathers considering technologies like AI and automation are displacing many regular jobs. He has claimed that the Tesla Bot which was unveiled earlier this year can solve the labour shortage problem. The Tesla Bot which was showcased earlier this year will allegedly pack in artificial intelligence capabilities aimed at completing general-purpose repetitive tasks.
Tesla has already started hiring for this Bot and at the Wall Street Journal Conference this year, he revealed, technologies that Tesla has developed for the sake of its self-driving capability is now being adapted to this bot.
“With the Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, I think we are creating the most advanced practical AI for navigating the real-world and you can also think of Tesla as the world’s biggest robot company – or semi-sentient robot company. The car is like a robot on 4-wheels. We can probably take that same technology and put in a humanoid robot – and have that robot be useful. Essentially, to have the humanoid part, we need to develop some custom actuators and sensors – and essentially use the Tesla Full Self-Driving and Autopilot or generally speaking real-world navigation AI in the humanoid robot,” said the world’s richest man.
He added, ” I think this can be quite profound. I don’t know exactly when we can get this right but we will get it right.”
Musk believes this could be a real solution to the labor shortage issue. Already in many countries, population growth is declining – Japan and China being at the forefront and even in India, the growth of the population has slowed down.
“It has the potential to be a general substitute for human labor over time. The foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is essentially distilled labour. I asked a friend of mine what should we optimize for and he said “gross profit per employee” – fully considered so you got to include the supply chain in that. The fundamental constraint is labor. There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough. There are not enough people. I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low and rapidly declining birth rate,” he said.
Many robotics and artificial intelligence experts have shown a sense of skepticism towards Tesla’s Bot project considering robotics leaders like Boston Dynamics haven’t managed to commercialize their technology which has been in development for years.