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Why the Tesla Bot Makes Zero Sense
The only plausible explanation is a scary one
Tesla is not a car company. Instead, it’s “arguably the world’s biggest robotics company,” as Elon Musk said. “Our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels.”
Every Tesla has a brain of its own, allowing it to self-drive, filter the air you breathe, protect itself from robbers, and keep your dogs comfortable while you go shopping. These smart features weren’t born from car technology but from computer science, specifically Artificial Intelligence. That’s why I nodded energetically when I heard the “robot on wheels” thing. But then, Musk added two sentences that confused the heck out of me.
“It kind of makes sense to put [our AI tech] in humanoid form,” he said. “It’s intended to be friendly, of course, and […] eliminate dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks.”
The idea seems cool and all, but when think deeply about it, putting Tesla’s AI tech in a humanoid form doesn’t make much sense. Not to mention, the “friendly” part is everything but comforting.
Useful robots don’t look like humans
I was born in the early 1990s, and as far as I can remember, robots have always been part of pop culture. Whether in cartoons, movies, or books, they appear as humanoid machines that speak and move like us. But under their human skin, they hide advanced features like X-ray vision, sharp intelligence, powerful jet engines, and of course, deadly weapons.
We grew so obsessed with this image that we became blind to a simple yet crucial fact. Real-life robots, the useful ones, look nothing like humans. Why? We designed them to be useful, not to satisfy our vivid imagination.
When we made automatic doors, for instance, we didn’t build mechanical doormen. Instead, we put together tiny electric motors connected to a bunch of sensors. As soon as you step close enough, the doors slide open. In other words, the door itself is the robot. Similarly, you don’t have a humanoid bot walking around the house cleaning your floor. You have an autonomous vacuum…
