technology

Tesla is building a humanoid robot to do manual labor and this is up there with his idiotic hyper loop projects in being a perfect example of his insane obsession with form over function because FuUTuRee.

Proposed tasks for the product are ones that are "dangerous, repetitive and boring", such as providing manufacturing assistance.

This week, Mr Musk told investors the humanoid robot's first application would be at a Tesla plant "moving parts around the factory, or something like that". But in the future, he sees it helping solve labour shortages.

Tesla Bot will measure 5'8" (173 cm) tall and weigh 125lbs (57 kg) [...] and have a carrying capacity of 45 lb (20 kg).

Elon thought to himself "wow wouldn't it be like really futuristic if we had humanoid robots working in our factories" and then decided that was a good idea. We have thousands, thousands of machines that can do repetitive, boring tasks like these better than any human ever could. There is literally no practical reason to confine your machine to human form, which is absolutely not optimal for pretty much anything.

2 legs are stupidly impractical, they make you slow and incredibly easy to push over compared to something with 4 legs, let alone something with wheels. Even just walking is a balancing act. 2 legs are the reason this billion-dollar-punchline can only carry a pathetic 20 kilograms.

The only, and I mean the only reason this is done is because it looks futuristic. In practice, it's a massive step backwards and it will make any work place perform worse than without them. Elon doesn't want "machines", those don't look like the future, he needs "robots". Robots which are, in practice, just humans but worse.