Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”
Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he&#x27;s had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the difficulty is much higher and entirely different skills are required.<p>SpaceX and Tesla are great achievements, but they are primarily stories of successfully implementing and improving existing technologies with innovative engineering and business practices (like iterative design for rockets), to capture markets that were ripe for disruption because they were controlled by a few large players who had no real incentive to improve.<p>Problems like level 5 self-driving and humanoid robots, in contrast, are different. We don&#x27;t see these things because they are hard problems that require basic technological breakthroughs that may not yet exist. Self-driving is one of those things that&#x27;s relatively easy to get 95% of the way to, but that last 5% is nearly impossible. And useful humanoid robots are probably a generation or two away from being possible; there are just all sorts of fundamental issues like energy storage, object manipulation, locomotion, etc, that are all so far beyond the current state-of-the-art that they&#x27;re almost science fiction.<p>I don&#x27;t see this happening in any useful form in the next 5-10 years.