Humanoids and ‘robots on wheels’

Elon Musk retakes the stage for Tesla’s second AI Day, which is expected to showcase just how sentient its AI products have become, writes Dana Hull.

Tesla has long staged splashy events to generate buzz and media coverage of forthcoming – and sometimes aspirational – products.

Part revival meeting, part recruiting event, the faithful get to see chief executive Elon Musk speak, and investors get updates on priorities and progress.

Today, Musk will host Tesla’s second AI Day in Palo Alto, California, formerly the home to its global headquarters. The event is expected to start at 1pm (NZ time).

The invitations that went out recently promised the latest developments in the company’s artificial intelligence efforts, including:

Full Self-Driving, or FSD, the inbeta system that still needs an attentive human driver minding the wheel at all times;

Tesla Bot, aka Optimus, the humanoid Musk has said will one day take over dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks from humans; and

Dojo, the supercomputer Musk has said Tesla’s FSD team may use to improve the ‘‘brains’’ behind the company’s driving systems, using the massive volume of footage that its cars capture.

The showstopper of Tesla’s first AI Day, in August of last year, was the humanoid bot that, at that time, was actually entirely human.

After engineers gave detailed, highly technical presentations about the company’s drivingsystem development work, a person dressed in a skintight white suit and a black helmet took to the stage to perform a jerky dance and presage an announcement by Musk.

‘‘Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company,’’ he said, explaining the rationale behind the carmaker working on a bot.

‘‘Our cars are basically semisentient robots on wheels.’’

Just how sentient Tesla’s cars actually are is the subject of more than just debate. Days before Musk made those comments, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into whether the company’s Autopilot system is defective, after drivers using it repeatedly collided with vehicles at crash scenes, including emergency responders. The agency opened a second defect probe in February.

Earlier this month, a California man filed a proposed class action suit in San Francisco federal court, claiming the carmaker has ‘‘deceptively and misleadingly’’ marketed its driver-assistance systems and strung consumers along by suggesting for years that it’s on the cusp of mastering the technology.

Musk has nonetheless extended access of FSD to about 160,000 owners in the United States and Canada. When one of those owners posted videos online last month showing the latest beta version struggling with right turns, the chief executive told the customer not to complain. When another Twitter fan suggested the world’s richest man may have been having a bad day and should apologise, Musk wrote back no – the owner was in the wrong.

The mood will surely be more jovial during AI Day, which Musk postponed in June to give Tesla time to develop a working Optimus prototype.

On its website and in job listings, the company refers to work on a bipedal humanoid for manufacturing, logistics and general purposes.

‘‘The code you will write will at term run in millions of humanoid robots across the world, and will therefore be held to high quality standards,’’ a posting for a controls engineer says.

Tesla employs more than 20,000 people just at its plant in Fremont, California. How many of those jobs will be eliminated by bots is far from certain.

An attempt to extensively automate the facility when the Model 3 first went into production ended in disaster. Musk took ownership of the calamity in 2018, saying it was his mistake. ‘‘Humans are underrated,’’ he quipped.

On its website and in job listings, the company refers to work on a bipedal humanoid for manufacturing, logistics and general purposes.