Elon Musk’s Tesla just had one of their fascinating nerd-fest days, this time proving (again) that they are the kings of vision AI for Full Self Driving (FSD) and . . are gonna build an android called TeslaBot as well.

These were awesome reveals showing that their directly interpreting 8 camera views as a birds-eye view is performing incredibly thanks to their on board neural network and freshly impressive server farm that’s processing and labelling training data, real and simulated.

And the planned android looks like a cool idea (more on that in a minute).

The naysayers still haven’t learned

But as usual it’s amazing to examine other ‘experts’ opinions. After all these years of Musk’s successes there are still doubters.

In fact quite respected futurist popular journals like Gizmodo and Popular Mechanics think Musk has lost the plot.

What’s really going on (the sharing of which is the main purpose of my blog) is that these journals just don’t get it.

They just do not get it.

They don’t understand that Musk’s reveals are about quantum jumps compared to everyone else’s increments.

Whether it’s following the reveal of labelled birds eye view from camera views in real time at 30 frames a second or why Tesla might realistically create the worlds first useful android.

Birds eye view makes it so much easier to improve accuracy. You can easily label training data for example. The car can make more informed decisions. And the awesome hardware on the ground Tesla revealed is exciting. An infinitely scalable grid of plug-and-play arrays of their custom in-house GPUs (each array probably worth millions) including data, power & cooling.

But these other commentators seem to just want results today, not see the sausage machine working.

Why write for tech journals then?

Real androids? Really?

Neither do these naysayers get why androids could be useful and doable.

Navigation and hand coordination by FSD-type neural network, and articulated by around 40 quiet motors, it will be ready in 2022 (don’t bet on it!) and be able to wash the dishes or do the shopping.

Think how this can help disabled people or in dangerous or repetitive jobs? Incredibly. And Elon’s dream of a city on Mars before he turns 90 needs robots of course.

But how much quicker and cheaper for us on earth to eg build houses etc with additional help?

Androids WILL be incredibly useful.

Of course they’re the next step.

Yes, ‘I Robot’ is not an impossible future but it’s more likely to be really useful.

It’s up to us to regulate them carefully.

Some don’t get the why or the how of Elon’s androids.

The why is because, as Elon points out, androids represent a multiplication of labor which suddenly becomes almost infinte for certain types of labour.

The how is that androids are just walking Teslas with arms.

As usual, don’t doubt Elon. It hasn’t ended well for that view in the past.