Tesla CEO Elon Musk has started the hype cycle on his company's next line of products: Humanoid Robots. Despite SpaceX's Starship, Neuralink's brain implants, Tesla's Cybertruck and more still not finished, Tesla Bot is now Musk's Twitter focus.
Tesla Bot was initially revealed at Tesla's AI Day event on August 19, 2021. However, no real hardware was at the event, opting to show off Tesla Bot cosplayers instead. Nevertheless, Musk seems adamant that the technology will release next year.
Why Tesla Bot is humanoid
Via Insider, Musk discussed the in-development humanoid robot technology, codenamed Optimus. Musk explained that “humanoid robots are happening. The rate of advancement of AI is very rapid.” However, the technology completely lacks personality.
Elon Musk told the company that Optimus will be a “general purpose, sort of worker-droid. The initial role must be in work that is repetitive, boring, or dangerous. Basically, work that people don't want to do."
When asked about the nature of humanoid robotics, the Tesla CEO discussed the nature of our world. As humanity has designed everything to be interacted with by a human, robot helpers must be humanoid as well.
"Humanity has designed the world to interact with a bipedal humanoid with two arms and ten fingers," Musk said. "So if you want to have a robot fit in and be able to do things that humans can do, it must be approximately the same size and shape and capability."
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Elon Musk wants you to download your personality
After discussing the humanoid nature of the robot, Musk explained that he wants to let people upload their thoughts to Tesla Bots. Obviously, this will not be a launch feature for the robots, but instead a plan for the future.
He said:
"We could download the things that we believe make ourselves so unique. Now, of course, if you're not in that body anymore, that is definitely going to be a difference, but as far as preserving our memories, our personality, I think we could do that."
The idea of uploading a person’s consciousness into a robot body does ask some existential questions about The Self. Is the consciousness uploaded to the robot body the original? Or does that person die and become replicated during the upload? Something to think about at night when you can't sleep.