Tesla is building a humanoid robot to do manual labor and this is up there with his idiotic hyper loop projects in being a perfect example of his insane obsession with form over function because FuUTuRee.
Proposed tasks for the product are ones that are "dangerous, repetitive and boring", such as providing manufacturing assistance.
This week, Mr Musk told investors the humanoid robot's first application would be at a Tesla plant "moving parts around the factory, or something like that". But in the future, he sees it helping solve labour shortages.
Tesla Bot will measure 5'8" (173 cm) tall and weigh 125lbs (57 kg) [...] and have a carrying capacity of 45 lb (20 kg).
Elon thought to himself "wow wouldn't it be like really futuristic if we had humanoid robots working in our factories" and then decided that was a good idea. We have thousands, thousands of machines that can do repetitive, boring tasks like these better than any human ever could. There is literally no practical reason to confine your machine to human form, which is absolutely not optimal for pretty much anything.
2 legs are stupidly impractical, they make you slow and incredibly easy to push over compared to something with 4 legs, let alone something with wheels. Even just walking is a balancing act. 2 legs are the reason this billion-dollar-punchline can only carry a pathetic 20 kilograms.
The only, and I mean the only reason this is done is because it looks futuristic. In practice, it's a massive step backwards and it will make any work place perform worse than without them. Elon doesn't want "machines", those don't look like the future, he needs "robots". Robots which are, in practice, just humans but worse.
Oh wow I thought the daft image of a humanoid bot was just promo bullshit, I didn't realise he wanted to create actual humanoid robots...
What the fuck? Why would you do that? Like you point out, there are vastly more efficient designs for robots if you want to automate production.
Surely it'd be far better to develop some sort of basic chassis with easily replaced modular bits depending on what job you needed it to do?
<5% chance he actually does anything, but I would imagine this design is just meant to appeal to the press and techbros, if it ever came into reality it would be a more appropriate design. Unlikely that even that happens.
The design was done by a random 3D artist. Then a bunch of lazy journalists just used it as their image for the story.
musk usually just jerks off to weird scifi concepts he tells his team to make up and then does nothing with it
Yeah. For ages when he first really popped up in the media I kinda assumed he must have doctorates in engineering and physics and all that. It's amazing that someone who basically fires coked up brainfarts at people with actual talent (who get paid a fraction of what he is 'worth') is lauded as a genius.
because it looks like something you'd see in a sci-fi movie, that's literally the only reason
big, clunky machines that can actually do things don't look as futuristic so they're of no use to elon