What, a billionaire that isn’t actually a technological genius? I know, shocking, right? It’s almost like billionaires make their vast mountains of cash from labour and market exploitation, not merit… But yes, Elon Musk is determined to make the same catastrophic yet straightforward mistake with AI time and again. Unfortunately, this is a huge problem, as he is pivoting Tesla from an EV giant to an AI platform that “brings AI into the physical world.” Yet, the reason Tesla’s FSD drives like a geriatric, drunken dementia patient, and Optimus makes C3PO look agile can all be traced back to this moron not learning the fundamental basics of the technology behind these systems.
Rodney Brooks has been calling out Musk on this topic for nearly a decade now, and if anyone is qualified for that role, it is him, as he is one of the world’s leading roboticists. In a recent essay, he criticised the humanoid robotics industry and its investors, pointing out that they are wasting their money and that this bubble is doomed to collapse. But his critique was targeted towards Tesla’s Optimus robot program in particular.
The problem? The data they are using to train the robots’ AI.
Companies like Tesla are training these AIs by feeding them videos of humans performing tasks, like folding clothes, with very little additional data, and Brooks simply pointed out that this approach is “pure fantasy thinking”.
Why? Because we humans use far more than just visual data to complete these tasks.
Brooks points out that we use touch significantly more than visual data to finish tasks. Our hands have 17,000 specialised, highly sensitive touch receptors capable of feeling changes as little as 40 μm (about half the width of a human hair), all working at around one billion bits per second. In other words, a single human hand feeds our brain over two gigabytes of highly detailed data every second! We need all of this fidelity, combined with remarkably dexterous and fast hands, just to do simple tasks. Without it, or with reduced sensation of touch, when we rely mostly on vision, things become much harder.
Yet robots like Optimus have hands with exponentially less touch fidelity. Not to mention that, while their hands are impressive, they still have significantly lower dexterity and speed compared to our digits.
This creates a huge problem.
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