- Elon Musk revealed Tesla’s humanoid robot at the company’s AI Day on Thursday.
- Musk joked that the bot will be built so that humans can “run away” and “most likely overpower” it.
- The ‘Tesla bot’ will be 5ft. 8in., weigh 125 pounds, and be able to carry 45 pounds, he said.
Elon Musk said that people would likely be able to “overpower” Tesla’s AI-powered robot.
The Tesla CEO unveiled plans for the new “Tesla Bot” at the company’s AI Day on Thursday. Musk said that the robot would be powered by Tesla’s Autopilot software, and would travel at a maximum of about 5 miles per hour.
It would be 5ft. 8in. tall and weigh 125 pounds, he said. It would be capable of dead-lifting 150 pounds and carrying about 45 pounds, it said.
“We’re setting it such that it is at a mechanical level, at a physical level, you can run away from it and most likely overpower it,” Musk said, per a YouTube recording of the event.
“Hopefully that doesn’t ever happen,” he joked. “But you never know.”
The bot was designed to carry out mundane tasks like grocery shopping, as well as dangerous tasks needed by businesses, he said.
He said that the bot would have eight cameras which would feed data into the same network that underpins its Full Self Driving software, called a neural network.
“Our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels,” Musk said. “It kind of makes sense to put that [the software] on to a humanoid form.”
Many people, including Musk himself, have expressed fears that AI-controlled robots could potentially overpower human beings, physically or otherwise. The Tesla CEO previously said in a 2018 documentary that AI could be built to be more intelligent than humans, and that people could lose control of the technology.
“AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity — if AI has a goal and humanity just happens in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it, no hard feelings,” he said in the film.
Musk said that he plans to develop a prototype of the “Tesla Bot” in 2022.