Tesla CEO Elon Musk has bet his EV maker on selling millions of humanoid robots, prognosticating earlier this month that the initiative could eventually make up a whopping 80 percent of Tesla’s value.
He’s promised that the company’s Optimus robot could generate over $10 trillion in revenue in the long term, orders of magnitude more than the amount of money the carmaker made last year.
If Musk is to be believed, the robot could lift the company’s market cap from just over $1 trillion to $25 trillion — by some unspecified date, at least.
But not everybody’s convinced that pouring billions of dollars into bipedal androids designed to do the dishes or fold laundry makes sense.
In a recent blog post, first spotted by Fortune, Rodney Brooks, the cofounder of Roomba vacuum maker iRobot, argued that Musk’s vision of an Optimus robot-filled future is “pure fantasy thinking.”
“Today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training,” he wrote.
Instead, he argued, “we will have plenty of humanoid robots fifteen years from now, but they will look like neither today’s humanoid robots nor humans.”
Brooks pointed to the difficulty of simulating human touch, rather than just limb dexterity, in robots. Despite “many hands modeled on human hands, with articulated fingers” having been built over the “last few decades,” human-like dexterity has remained tricky.
While the current crop of robot companies are using machine learning to physically teach humanoid robots new tricks, “we do not have such a tradition for touch data,” Brooks argued.
“To think we can teach dexterity to a machine without understanding what components make up touch, without being able to measure touch sensations, and without being able to store and replay touch is probably dumb,” he wrote. “And an expensive mistake.”
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