Elon Musk’s Tesla Bot comes with serious concerns
The Print : Elon Musk announced a humanoid robot designed to help with those repetitive, boring tasks people hate doing. Musk suggested it could run to the grocery store for you, but presumably, it would handle any number of tasks involving manual labor.
Predictably, social media is filled with references to a string of dystopian sci-fi movies about robots where everything goes horribly wrong.
As troubling as the robot futures in movies like I, Robot, The Terminator, and others are, it’s the underlying technologies of real humanoid robots – and the intent behind them – that should be cause for concern.
Musk’s robot is being developed by Tesla. It’s a seeming departure from the company’s car-making business until you consider that Tesla isn’t a typical automotive manufacturer. The so-called “Tesla Bot” is a concept for a sleek, 125-pound humanlike robot that will incorporate Tesla’s automotive artificial intelligence and autopilot technologies to plan and follow routes, navigate traffic – in this case, pedestrians – and avoid obstacles.
Dystopian sci-fi overtones aside, the plan makes sense, albeit within Musk’s business strategy. The built environment is made by humans, for humans. And as Musk argued at the Tesla Bot’s announcement, successfully advanced technologies are going to have to learn to navigate it in the same ways people do.
Yet Tesla’s cars and robots are merely the visible products of a much broader plan aimed at creating a future where advanced technologies liberate humans from our biological roots by blending biology and technology. As a researcher who studies the ethical and socially responsible development and use of emerging technologies, I find that this plan raises concerns that transcend speculative sci-fi fears of super-smart robots.
Self-driving cars, interplanetary rockets, and brain-machine interfaces are steps toward the future Musk envisions where technology is humanity’s savior. In this future, energy will be cheap, abundant, and sustainable; people will work in harmony with intelligent machines and even merge with them, and humans will become an interplanetary species.
It’s a future that, judging by Musk’s various endeavors, will be built on a set of underlying interconnected technologies that include sensors, actuators, energy and data infrastructures, systems integration, and substantial advances in computer power. Together, these make a formidable toolbox for creating transformative technologies.
Musk imagines humans ultimately transcending our evolutionary heritage through technologies that are beyond-human, or “super” human. But before the technology can become superhuman, it first needs to be human – or at least be designed to thrive in a human-designed world.
This make-tech-more-human approach to innovation is what’s underpinning the technologies in Tesla’s cars, including the extensive use of optical cameras. These, when connected to an AI “brain,” are intended to help the vehicles autonomously navigate road systems that are, in Musk’s words, designed for biological neural nets with optical imagers – in other words, people. In Musk’s telling, it’s a small step from human-inspired “robots on wheels” to humanlike robots on legs.