In 2021, Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot. Optimus The robot on stage wasn't an actual robot, it was instead a human actor in a robot costume. but Musk claimed within a year they would have a working prototype. According to Musk, the Optimus robot will be powered by the same artificial intelligence which Powers Tesla's full self-driving cars and will be able to do almost any mundane task a human can do.

Importantly, individual tasks will not need to be programmed manually. The robot will be smart enough to respond to verbal instructions to do just about anything. Everything from operating Machinery at a factory to picking up items at a grocery store could be done by the robot. If the robot can do everything a human can do, human workers will no longer be necessary.

Musk says the widespread adoption of Optimus will bring about a post scarcity world where working will become a choice. The economic gains will be enough to finance a universal basic income. The idea of a general purpose humanoid robot is nothing new. Companies around the world have been developing such robots for decades with similar Ambitions, but almost invariably these projects have been expensive and disappointing failures.

Over the past 2 years, Tesla has released a number of carefully choreographed videos showing the capabilities of the Optimus robot, but it is clearly still in its experimental stages. In this video, we'll look at the challenges of developing a commercially viable humanoid robot, why almost all previous attempts at this have failed, and whether Tesla's Optimus will suffer a similar F. Before we take a deep dive into humanoid robots I Want to take a quick pause to thank the sponsor of today's video? Public Public.com has just launched its new High Yield Cash account offering an industry-leading 5.1% apy, no fees, no subscription, and no minimums or maximums. That means you can grow your cash with 5.1% interest with no strings attached.

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Full disclosures in terms and conditions can be found in the video description. High Yield cash accounts are available for Us members only. And now back to the video. The idea of a humanoid robot has cap activated the human imagination for centuries, all the way back in the 15th century.

Leonardo Da Vinci Designed a humanoid robot fitted into a suit of armor powered by a series of gears and pulley. Of course, the technology at the time didn't allow him to turn his dream into a reality. In the modern era, most of the development in this field has come from. Japan Japan is the oldest country in the world, with an estimated 29% of the population above the age of 65.

Given the low birth rate, this percentage is only expected to increase going forward. Eventually, there will be too many retirees and not enough young people to work at the nursing homes, which could have disastrous economic and social consequences. One of the potential Solutions is to develop robots which can perform these tasks instead of humans. While there might not be enough young people to take care of the elderly, you could theoretically make an unlimited number of robots to solve this problem.

One of the first companies to make a serious attempt at this was a Japanese Automobile Giant. Honda They started developing robots in the 1980s and in 2000 they unveiled Asimo a humanoid robot capable of on two legs Honda Eventually envisaged Asimo working as an in-house carer for elderly people, helping to do things like prepare meals and clean the house. Over the next two decades, they made numerous improvements to. Asimo They showed demonstrations of it, performing delicate tasks such as pouring a glass of juice without spilling.

It looked like development was progressing rapidly and it might soon achieve the dream of a functionally useful human assistant. But behind the scenes, the technical challenges were far greater than what you might assume from watching the highly choreographed. Demos In 2018 Honda Shut down Asimo Almost 20 years after the initial release, they were still many years away from making a commercially viable product, and they could no longer justify the tens of millions of dollars they were pumping into the project every year. So what went wrong? The problems with Asimo and all other attempts at humanoid robots were best explained by the Austrian-american computer scientist Hans Morc.

In 1988, he came up with the Morc Paradox The idea is that computers are very good at doing mathematical calculations and higher level reasoning, but is very difficult for them to replicate human perception skills. In his words quote, it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tasks or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception. And Mobility Unquote, Take the example of a math problem. If you wanted to know what 10 million is divided by 832, this calculation would be almost impossible for even the smartest human to do, but even a basic calculator can do this in a tiny fraction of a second.

For comparison, bring a glass of juice is Trivial Even a child can do this without thinking, but in reality, this is an incredibly complex task. Your fingers have millions of nerves which tell you the exact amount of pressure on each part of your hand. With this constant feedback, you continuously adjust how much you contract your muscles to keep the pitch in the desired position. This task is made all the more complicated as the weight of the pitch changes as its contents are poured out.

You can see the juice falling into the cup and use this information to adjust how you pour and when to stop. Your brain processes millions of signals from your nerves and eyes every second. This all happens subconsciously, but is incredibly difficult for a computer to replicate. That's why it took multiple decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to make an ASIMO robot that can pour glass of juice and while later stages of Asimo could indeed respond to simple voice commands, most of the public demonstrations were carefully choreographed and hard programmed.

For example, in 2010, Honda conducted a marketing gimmick where they had the ASIMO robot conduct a symphony orchestra. This was meant to showcase the dexterity of the robot's hand and fingers. It took Honda's Engineers 6 months to program the Asimo to conduct a two-minute Symphony. They looked at a video of a real world conductor and hardcode the instructions line by line.

Even when the robot was pre-programmed its performance was often subpar. The commercials often had to be shot multiple times, and they would only publish a video where everything went according to plan. For example, in this commercial from 2006, the Asimo can be seen flawlessly walking up a flight of stairs. A few years later, they tried the same thing in front of a live audience.

m of the audience were videotaping the event, so Honda couldn't cover up a failure if you take off the white shell. The Asimo was incredibly complex with thousands of sensors, gears, and other mechanical. Parts While Asimo never went on sale, Executives had indicated to the media that its price tag would be the equivalent of about $2.5 million Us. Obviously, nobody was going to pay so much money for a robot that barely works, so they pulled the plug.

Finally, ditching the ill- fated project in 2018, another company that has developed a humanoid robot is Boston Dynamics In 2016, they unveiled their bipedal Atlas robot, which shows impressive dexterity in their promotional videos. But just like the Asimo, it has to be meticulously pre-programmed for each demonstration and is prohibitively expensive to mass-produce It's an experimental program meant to test the limits of their technology. They have no plans to commercialize it in the foreseeable future. Instead, they're focusing on a four-legged robot called Spot, which costs about $75,000 The fact that it has four legs instead of two makes it far easier to balance, but its lack of arms and fingers also make it far less useful.

So far, the main use case has been maintenance monitoring at industrial facilities. Cameras can be attached to it to read dials, and thermal cameras can be attached to see if equipment is overheating. The idea is that I can walk around a factory at night to see if any equipment is broken or in need of Maintenance. While this could be useful in some cases, it's a far cry from ushering in a post scarcity world where work becomes optional.

In an interview with the Lex Friedman Podcast in April of 201 23 Boston Dynamic CEO Robert Plater said the company had sold 1,100 of their spot robots. To become profitable, they would need to sell 1,000 to 1,500 per year. It's been available to purchase since June of 2020, so in the first 3 years they've sold about 360 spots per year. This is less than onethird of the number they need to reach break even the lackluster sales is probably combination of The Limited use case, as well as the entrance of Chinese competitors which have made similar robots at a fraction of the cost.

They aren't as capable, but for the purposes of walking around a factory with a camera, they'll probably do the job. So now let's go back to Tesla's robot. According to Musk, they have a huge Head Start because of the work they've already done with self-driving technology. The self-driving artificial intelligence can also be applied to a humanoid robot.

We've made multiple videos in the past about problems with Tesla's self-driving technology. We've linked the videos in the video description below. Long story short, Tesla's autopilot and full self-driving are far less competent than Musk wants you to believe. Even if if full, self-driving was as advanced as Mus claims, it doesn't necessarily follow that this technology could be directly applied to the humanoid robot.

Autonomous driving is challenging because you have to detect other cars, pedestrians, and other obstacles on the road, but the actual functions of the car are quite simple. It can accelerate, decelerate, break, and turn. The degrees of freedom of what it can do is quite limited. The degrees of freedom for a human is much greater.

The types of things you can do with your hands are orders of magnitude more diverse than what a car can do. Tesla Has released a number of videos of the bot development. They show it being manually trained by a human to perform discrete tasks basically the same way Honda's Asima was trained. We have not yet seen any evidence of artificial intelligence.

The most impressive thing we've seen it do so far is picking up an egg without breaking it, but it's unclear how many eggs they had to break before they finally got a shot of the robot picking it up successfully. Remember that the ASIMO robot also appeared to perform well in pre-recorded videos, but often failed in front of live audiences. Tesla is no stranger to publishing receptive demo videos. In 2016, they posted a Now Infamous video showcasing their full self-driving technology.

In the beginning of the video, it says the person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. the car is driving itself. In a later lawsuit over an autopilot death, Tesla's director of Autopilot software was compelled to testify.

He admitted that the video was staged. They used 3D mapping of a predetermined route. When they first tried it, the driver had to intervene multiple times. They had to do many takes of the video before they can get one with no driver interventions.

In fact, one of the test runs of the car actually crashed into a fence when it was trying to park. Basically, the whole thing was a fraud. All right guys, that wraps it up for this video. What do you think about Tesla's Optimus robot? Will it usher in a post scarcity world? Or is it just another one of Silicon Valley's pipe dreams? Let us know in the comments section below.

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