look at the way this robot is moving its hands the movement is so natural that it actually appears to be unnatural your brain is screaming at you that this video can't possibly be real but it is and you're not only looking at Tesla's latest invention you're also looking at their newest employee Optimus and there are going to be a lot more of these Robots coming very soon to a factory near you this isn't about the future anymore the manufacturing industry is changing in a very big way as we speak and 2024 is going to be known as the year of the Tesla bot while Tesla still hasn't brought C3PO from Star Wars to life the most recent demo video we saw in December 2023 was very exciting debuting the Optimus Gen 2 the video shows the bot walking much smoother 30% faster than before it even got articulated toe sections making the walking action itself feel far more human the bot itself is 10 kg lighter and gets a neck that can move on two axis of rotation the brand new arms now feature 11 joints and can move faster thanks to improved Tesla designed actuators but the most impressive update was the addition of precise tactile sensing on all fingers allowing for some very fine and delicate hand control it demonstrated this by picking up an egg and placing it precisely in an egg holder an action that morx Paradox says should be very hard but more on that later all of this is now wrapped in a Sleek New Gen 2 body that Tesla says is far better balanced with much improved full body control it can now perform a squat with ease reminding us all not to Skip Leg Day at the gym Tesla has made a big deal this year about moving the manufacturing of their actuators in house in fact back in March they said that the reason Optimus gen 1 was operating so well compared to the 2020 debut model bumblebee was because the team had decided to produce these delicate Parts themselves rather than using off-the-shelf components actuators are the bits that convert input signals into the actual Force required to move anything from the Tesla bot's legs to the Fine motion of its fingers and this is where Tesla gets to show off in the brief moments when we see the robot's neck and fingers move for the first time the subtitles tell us that the neck now has a 2 doof actuated joint and the fingers have a whopping 11 doof do here refers to degrees of freedom which in mechanics is referring to an axis on which an object can move in the case of the new neck joint this means that the neck can now rotate left and right as well as pitching forwards and backwards which means that those fingers are very articulated in fact the motion of those fingers are now so smooth that Optimus developers felt they had to jump into the replies and confirm that this video wasn't CGI and hadn't been sped up the really mind-blowing Tech is not even the actuators though it's whatever Tesla is now using to give their robots some tactile sense in its fingers during the last few seconds of the video we are shown Optimus handling some eggs with a visualization of the sensors in its fingers now robots handle eggs all the time but they usually do so with little tricks they're either programmed with the precise amount of force needed to pick up the egg without cracking it or they are designed to use some soft grippers that use suction to hold the delicate object but Tesla went the more human way and seems to have developed some sort of pressure sensor that allows Optimus to feel whatever it's holding and gauge the correct amount of force to use within those delicate new actuators this is way closer to how humans actually interact with objects with the nerves in our fingers telling us things like the shape texture and give of a surface and then sending that information to our brains to process and make the decision of how much force to use when manipulating it and this is exactly how we've been told Optimus Works back in March when the Gen one was showcased Tesla presenters made a big deal about their robots learning algorithms that video of Optimus sorting blocks from a little later on in September was another example of it learning by doing having only received orders to sort the blocks by color but not how we don't know any details on this tactile sensing technology quite yet if we ever will it could very well be proprietary but it could very well be used in the robots field as well to help it gauge the surfaces it's walking on just like we do when Elon first announced the Tesla bot at the artificial intelligence date in August 2021 the goal was to create a general purpose bipedal autonomous humanoid robot capable of Performing unsafe repetitive or boring tasks so a bot that doesn't take away the fun things but can run into a burning building to save someone a bot that can work at dangerous deep sea mines or simpler more boring tasks like sorting out eggs at the factory in his vision of the future Elon sees us only working when we want to because the labor will be unlimited thanks to these Bots he also said that we will certainly need a universal basic income at that point but that's a discussion for an economist which I certainly am not anyway the Bumblebee prototype we did see a year later in 2022 was clunky and slow but certainly humanoid a year after that we got the Optimus prototype it had improved it could now walk smoothly almost like a human the bot could sort out objects based on color as a man constantly kept shuffling them around which would annoy me greatly if I was a bot but fortunately the bot is as patient and forgiving as a grandma with grandkids it could even carry out finer jobs like picking up a nut and placing it precisely and use powered hand tools to drill a screw it was honestly pretty cool to see it was also the first time we got to see Tesla's neural network for bots in action this development was possible with the advancements Tesla made with AI in the past year and while we don't know detailed specifics of how it functions Elon has said it works very similarly to the full self-driving system found in Tesla vehicles and about that we do know quite a bit currently in the 11th version the FSD system uses a rules-based approach where road laws and rules are fed into the programming and then implemented by the vehicle for FSD version 12 though Tesla is trying out a learning system Instead This dictates that instead of following hard and fast rules the system learns from footage from incident recordings something Tesla has thousands of hours of basically it studies driver behavior and emulates it this is an important change that makes the system far safer by doing what others around you do instead of only reacting in ways is already pre-programmed this is Cutting Edge artificial intelligence in action and we saw this when Elon went live on X a while back demoing it in his own car with no accidents at least none on camera speaking of cameras the FSD system relies primarily on the video recordings from the cameras on the car instead of relying on lar sensors like most other autonomous vehicles do it studies the video footage and not data off sensors that's why weo and Cruise have those ugly Contraptions on them while the Tesla just looks like a regular car now applying that to a bot has some great advantages instead of using data from sensors to create an image of its surroundings the Tesla bot uses cameras and instead of programming the exact angle the arms and legs need to be to carry out a specific task the AI can just observe humans and learn from that of course this means a lot of observation since it doesn't have the data set of videos Tesla vehicles do but given enough time it is possible we do have five times as many people as we do cars and just like with Tesla vehicles the system gets better the longer it is used now this will understandably require significant computing power but the rewards should be much greater adaptability and a lot more learning we have already seen evidence of this with the latest Tesla bot demos we mentioned earlier those tasks should have been incredibly difficult but the Optimus prototype seemed to sail through it comfortably with the Optimus Gen 2 demo we saw in 2023 all of these systems seem to have been further refined the movements are now smoother and more precise and it's looking closer to a bot that can actually prove useful a robot is defined as a machine especially one programmable by a computer capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically we've had them for quite a long time from the vacuum cleaners roaming our houses to the robots that put together our cars we've actually gotten incredibly good at building them to carry out increasingly complex but singular purpose tasks cast a new part fill up a glass bottle arrange boxes in a row the list goes on they do it very effectively and it's been at the heart of our economic and Manufacturing progress they have not replaced humans but they have replaced individual human tasks and yet we have seen very few humanoid robots in that time other than in all the Sci-Fi movies of course we had good reason for that we simply never needed them but Elon Musk believes the time has come for them to replace human individuals and we thus needed the humanoid robot okay let me explain before you go all I knew it on the Skynet conspiracy theories Elon believes the human population is declining at a rapid rate and we are on the brink of of what he calls population collapse and with economies being a direct factor of Labor input with a massive drop in available labor Global economies and gdps will start to crumble going from recession to depression certainly not ideal the solution AI powered Bots to take over labor think of it like this on one hand you can have a Porsche 911 GT3 RS it's a dedicated sports car that's great at one specific task going incredibly fast but terrible at everything else that's what most robots are today great at one task now imagine a car that can go almost as quick but then when it's not on a track is still extremely comfortable to drive it can transport a family of five and travel 600 km that's what the humanoid seeks to do it seeks to do more by being adaptable and letting the task decide what it needs to do at any given moment but we can't talk about robots without first mentioning Boston Dynamics they are by far the leaders in the industry thanks to the Head Start they've had by working on biomimetic robots since 1992 and unveiling their first humanoid robot in 2009 you see Elon Musk wasn't the first to think of and develop a humanoid robot he was just the first to want them mass produced Boston Dynamics most advanced bot Atlas was UN failed all the way back in 2013 and has been steadily improving in the things it can do it can run jump and throw suit cases with a fair degree of accuracy and it can do a backflip which is the part I'm most envious of ideally the Tesla bot would have the physical capabilities of the atlas it will certainly be compared to it with all the claims Elon has made but there is one fundamental difference elon's robot is designed to run entirely on AI while the atlas is still for the most part relying on machine learning and programming from very clever engineers and this changes things building a robot has some unique problems especially if you want one to replicate human actions at the heart of it is the moravec Paradox simply put it says that when it comes to robots and machines carrying out human activities the easy things are very hard so a robot will not struggle with complex tasks like deciding how much force to throw a bucket with so it is a certain distance but simple perception-based activities like sitting in a chair are very hard to carry out think of the things you do that are almost subconscious those are the ones robots struggle with most this goes down to how robots have been designed so far the Boston Dynamics Atlas for example relies a lot on machine learning it needs to be taught what that means is someone provides it a start point and a desired outcome and then lets the robot figure out the best path to it it should be noted though that the multiple paths still need to be programmed into the robot it then chooses the most efficient one based on the parameters while incredibly impressive it is timec consuming and limiting but as we explained earlier the Tesla bot does things differently relying on an AI powered neural network and a vision-based system to see the world and then learn this greatly improves its ability to adapt and be useful in different and unique situations and will certainly be its greatest advantage against its competitors so is this really going to happen well we know Elon and his timelines are not reliable but Tesla is completely committed to this Venture and unlike Boston Dynamics which is more of a technological exploration exercise Tesla is designing this for the mass Market in fact Elon says they have already vertically integrated for the design of the Prototype planning for large scale manufacturing from the get-go the actuators are all designed in-house by the same guys who built the model S plaid motor because off-the-shelf parts were simply not up to the task Tesla wanted them for the computers electronics and Battery Systems are all Tesla designs so when they do start building these Bots for the public they will roll out a ton of them Elon also says the Bots will be cheaper than Tesla's cars and will become a bigger product for the company than the rest of their catalog combined and that's some point in the future there could be more Bots than humans on Earth at the astonishing rate at which the Tesla Optimus bot is developing that future might not be so far away the Boston Dynamics Atlas took 10 years to learn to dance do some parkour and Carry Out basic tasks the Optimus bot has learned to walk sort blocks out by color and precisely Place eggs in around 2 years so it's fair to assume that rate of improvement will continue especially based on Tesla's AI approach in addition to that Tesla is answerable to their investors and with Elon stating it could be bigger than their Automotive business there is certainly going to be a renewed push to see this come to Market and with all Tesla has learned about manufacturing at scale thanks to all the gigafactories this will not be an insurmountable challenge but above all we can simply expect the Optimus prototype to demonstrate far more usability and practicality for real world scenarios in 2024 I'm not sure how I feel about robots outnumbering us and even though the chance of an AI robot takeover is negligible it still isn't zero they make three movies on that every year that being said Elon has been vocal about these Bots not being a threat to us saying we don't want a Terminator scenario the Optimus bot has a top speed of 5 m hour so you should be able to outrun it and the new Gen 2 now weighs about 50 kilos so you should be able to overpower it as well boss Dynamics on their part has pushed for legislation to prevent General use robots from ever being weaponized and Elon seems to be of the same opinion if all goes to plan and it rarely does the Optimus prototype will change our lives and our economies unlike anything else the implications of Outsourcing the entire labor force to bots are huge I look forward to eliminating mundane everyday tasks and jobs and while it continues to be slightly terrifying there's no escaping the reality the Bots are coming