I watched the event and didn’t get any of this. Could you quote directly?

The suited dancer was just an 'ice breaker' joke to start off, and obviously so. It was presented as such. Did anyone seriously think it was being put forward as a real robot??

They don't have to be selling them to gain financially off of lies. They were obviously trying to juice the stock price.

Yes. Do you believe otherwise? Why should someone be exempt from following laws based on their stock value?

Yeah, I found it quite amazing that it wasn't disclosed that he was holding significant amounts of Twitter stock when he made an offer well-above asking price, inflating that stock price, and then tried to back out of the deal.

It makes it look like a classic dogecoin pump-and-dump scheme which backfired when it became clear how completely illegal it was. I haven't followed it in detail though so am curious about other interpretations

To my understanding, there was a human remote assisting the robot in some demos. So some of the demos were just the AI, others like the bartender was a robot being controlled by a human. Honestly it doesn’t seem that bad to me, when I read the headline I thought it was going to be people in costumes

A house keeper? No. Imo the use case is for jobs that are easy, necessary, and low utilization where you mostly pay people to be present and available but not actually doing anything. The value here is the ability to scale up and down quickly. Can’t do that with real humans.

The ease of swapping different expertise in to the same body as needed could also potentially be useful.

> If you say yes, ask yourself why even bother reshoring manufacturing at higher cost and with trade barriers.

Mostly the reasoning to onshore things is to ensure independence on manufacturing critical resources despite the competitive disadvantage; not a jobs program.

Wow, when you put it like that I realised there must be a market for this kind of thing, given that cost and speed of operation are incremental changes that will plausibly improve over the midterm.

So you'll have upper-middle class people own a robot and whenever they want a task done they order it from basically a call-centre somewhere in the world... reminds me of the etymology of "robot" - from the Slavic for "slave"...

You're right there are ethical issues, but hardly new ones for this context. In response to your question,

> Should employers be able to outsource low-skill physical labor to actual humans abroad to circumvent wage and immigration laws?

This is a very pertinent question ethically, but this already undergirds our current globalized society, where the the clothes most of us are wearing, the coffee we've been drinking, much of the food we've been eating today, and so on, are produced exactly by such labor. This is the way the world works, for the time being. And it's unfair. But these robotic possibilities don't add to the unfairness in my view, although they definitely would give it a new twist. Given current trends I wouldn't bet against increased twistedness..

Maybe - $20k is a bit steep, but I would certainly pay a large premium to have my housework done without needing to employ a stranger to actually work in my home.

Housekeepers in a lot of places charge $50+ per hour

Mining. War. Sewer cleaning. Tons of jobs where it would help not being actively in the call of duty, and where precision isn't as much of a priority.

This is beyond Elon Musk and Tesla. How much will they cost in a few years? Has someone watched "Robot & Frank (2012)"?.

  >remote control first

If you mean it's the typical operating mode for the final product, I doubt we can conclude that just from an early public tech demo.

That is because humanoid robots are general purpose forms, rather than purpose built forms.

Factory robotics is mostly just conveyor belts and pusher whatevers. Not even something resembling a droid of any kind.

Although that was neither remotely controlled, nor humanoid, nor a robot.

ASIMO never made it off stage, and Honda never prioritized shipping it. We definitely never saw ASIMO milling around a crowded event and serving drinks and handing out gift bags.

It was never remote controllable by unskilled operators.

It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to come up with scenarios where even a remote controlled bot would be incredibly useful to society. If Honda never productized it or developed Asimo into something practical, then we can only speculate the reasons why. But that's on Honda for failing to follow through, ultimately.

We have teleoperated robotic arms for surgery. We do not have practical humanoid robots and have never had practical, productized teleoperated humanoid robots.

Not even a mammal. Even having the articulations in the wrong place (as the Boston dynamics dog) creates a lot of discomfort in the potential customers

Generally having fewer than four wheels reduces stability while not offering compensating substantial advantages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-wheeler#Configurations). And more than four disjoint wheels means adding further axles and coping with the problem that on a bumpy road a wheel pair may entirely lose contact with the road.

As for headlights, a single central one would still be notably face-like given widely spaced turning indicators. And having two headlights gives redundancy: "one-eyed monsters" at night are preferable to cars lacking any lights.

This is a good point - households, and their implements and staircases and so on, have evolved to fit our shapes

None of those bots ever made it out of the lab or controlled stage presences. They were never pointless. They gave up for the same reason many people gave up on AI multiple times over the last 70 years. The compute wasn't there and the techniques were too manual. They were literally the meme of the miner giving up just before he strikes a diamond. Honda retired Asimo in 2017, the same year Google published "Attention Is All You Need".

SpaceX does, as we saw today. I suspect it’s in part because your employment options in aerospace are very limited and SpaceX is one of the best if you want to advance your career or work on cool stuff in space. I also get the sense it’s the one Elon cares most about and the one with the strongest sense of internal mission.

His other companies less so. Tesla was early in EVs and did a lot of things right but the FSD push has been a huge disappointment and stuff like Cybertruck is a joke. Meanwhile other car companies are catching up. Boring company is boring. Maybe Neuralink?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufbxvRo2rnY

In the mid to late '90s there were actually several EVs from major car makers, such as the first generation RAV4 EV from Toyota (1997-2003), the Nissan Altra (1997-2001) (the first production EV to use a lithium-ion battery), the Honda EV Plus (1997-1999), the Chevy S-10 Electric pickup (1997-1998), the GM EV1 (1996-1999), the Ford Ranger EV (1997-2002), and the Chrysler TEVan (1993-1995).

This was in response to California pushing for more efficient cars with the ultimate goal of zero-emissions.

What really helped Tesla was that they started out going for the sports car crowd. For someone's day to day workhorse car a lack of good support infrastructure is a big problem. People want that car to be useful for everything.

The people who could afford a $100k+ sports car could afford another car for when they needed to take the whole family somewhere, or take a long trip, or get groceries (the first generation Tesla Roadster's cargo capacity was less than that of a Mini Cooper convertible, about 1/3 of a Honda Civic or Nissan Sentra or Toyota Corolla). This meant that Tesla's market in the mid-2000s cared a lot less about EV infrastructure than the people who might have been interested in those '90s EVs.

There was another company making an EV sport car at the time, the AC Propulsion tzero. The people who founded Tesla actually founded Tesla because they saw that such a car would have a good chance of success but AC Propulsion wasn't interested in going into commercial production. They wanted to remain a technology company selling EV technology to others, rather than become a car company. So Tesla was formed, and licensed AC Propulsion's drive train and thus was born the Tesla Roadster.