SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters): Tesla has planned a high-tech solution to dangerous and boring work.
CEO Elon Musk unveiled plans to build a ‘Tesla bot’. Speaking at the company’s AI Day event, the billionaire entrepreneur said his company already had the key ingredients to make a humanoid robot.
“If you think about what we’re doing right now with the cars, Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company, because cars are like semi-sentiment, robots on wheels.”
Musk said Tesla bot was being designed with an AI system, allowing it to perform a wide range of tasks from attaching a bolt to a car to doing the grocery shopping.
Musk has warned against the dangers of AI in the past. However, he said the company is taking precautions with Tesla bot. It will only be able to move at about 5 miles an hour. Meaning it could probably be outrun and even overpowered if needed.
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“Hopefully that doesn’t ever happen, but you never know. Safety is a bigger issue than ever for Tesla,” he added. US regulators this week opened an investigation into its driver assistance system touched off by a series of crashes involving Teslas and safety vehicles.
Musk said a prototype for the Tesla bot would be ready sometime next year. Although one expert challenged that, saying it will take much longer than even a decade to make a robot that is capable of doing grocery shopping.
