"Tesla Bot" is an idea for a sleek, 57 kg robot that will combine artificial intelligence and Tesla's "autopilot" technologies to plan and follow routes, navigate traffic - in this case, pedestrians, and avoid obstacles, but is this technology ready yet and how will it be possible prevent its misuse?
Andrew Maynard, Associate Dean, College for Global Futures, Arizona State University. Translation: Avi Blizovsky
Elon Musk announced a humanoid robot designed to help with repetitive and boring tasks that people hate to do. Musk said that this robot will be able to go grocery shopping but will presumably handle a number of manual tasks.
As expected, social media is full of references to a series of dystopian sci-fi movies about robots where everything goes horribly wrong. For example, the future of robots in movies like: 'I, Robot', 'Terminator' and others. The underlying technologies of true humanoid robots – and the intent behind them – should cause concern.
Musk's robot is developed by 'Tesla'. It's such an apparent departure from the company's car-making business that it's easy to mistake Tesla for not being a typical automaker. The so-called "Tesla Bot" is an idea for a sleek, 57 kg robot that will combine artificial intelligence and Tesla's "autopilot" technologies to plan and track routes, navigate traffic - in this case, pedestrians, and avoid obstacles.
If we leave the dystopian scares aside for a moment - the plan makes sense, as part of Musk's business strategy. The built environment is produced by humans, for humans. Successful advanced technologies will have to learn to navigate in the same ways that humans do, as Musk argued in the 'Tesla Bot' announcement.
But Tesla's cars and robots are only the visible products of a much broader plan to create a future in which advanced technologies free humans from their biological roots by merging biology and technology. As a researcher who studies the development and ethical and social use of emerging technologies, I find that this program raises concerns that go beyond speculative science fiction concerns of intelligent robots.
A man with big plans
Self-driving cars, interplanetary spaceships and brain-machine interfaces are steps Musk's experts are planning for a future where technology is humanity's savior. In this future, energy will be cheap, abundant and sustainable. People will work in harmony with smart machines and even merge with them and humans will become an interstellar species.
Judging by Musk's various efforts, this is a future that will be built on a series of interconnected technologies that include sensors, actuators, energy and data infrastructures, system integration, and significant advances in computer power. Together, these create a formidable toolbox for creating transformative technologies.
Musk envisions humans eventually transcending our evolutionary heritage through superhuman, or superhuman, technologies. But before technology can become superhuman, it must first be human, or at least be designed to thrive in a human-designed world.
The more human technological approach to innovation is the one that underlies the technologies in Tesla's cars, including the extensive use of optical cameras. These, when connected to an AI "brain", are designed to help vehicles navigate road systems autonomously, which are similarly "designed for biological neural networks with optical capabilities." -In other words, people. In Musk's terms, it's a small step from human-inspired "robots on wheels" to humanoid robots on legs.
Easier said than done
Tesla's "full self-driving" technology, which includes the dubious-named "autopilot" technology, is a starting point for Tesla Bot developers. As impressive as this technology is, it proves to be completely unreliable. Collisions and fatalities related to Tesla's autopilot mode - the latter linked to algorithms that have difficulty identifying parked emergency vehicles - cast doubt on the technology's ability to be released into the public sphere so quickly.
These problems do not bode well for humanoid robots that rely on the same technology. However, this is not just a case of getting the technology right. Tesla's autopilot malfunctions are exacerbated by human behavior. For example, some Tesla drivers treated their technology-enhanced cars as if they were fully autonomous vehicles and did not pay enough attention to driving. Could something similar happen with the Tesla bot?
The "orphan risks" of Tesla Bot
In my work on socially beneficial technological innovation, I am particularly interested in orphan risks—risks that are difficult to quantify and easy to ignore, but nonetheless inevitably fail entrepreneurs. My colleagues and I are working with entrepreneurs and others (perhaps we should add a disclosure at the beginning of the article in light of what is written) on navigating these types of challenges through the "Innovation and Risk Nexus", an initiative of the University of Arizona's Orin Edson Entrepreneurship Innovation Institute and the Global Futures Lab.
The Tesla Bot comes with a whole set of orphan risks. These include potential threats to privacy and autonomy when the bot collects, shares and acts on potentially sensitive information. challenges related to how people are expected to think about and respond to humanoid robots; Possible adjustments between ethical or ideological perspectives - for example, in crime control or policing civil demonstrations; and more. These are challenges that are rarely addressed in the training that engineers receive, yet watching them can lead to disaster.
While Tesla Bot may seem harmless – or even a bit of a joke – if it is both useful and commercially successful, its developers, investors, future consumers and others need to ask hard questions about how it might threaten what's important to it, and how to deal with those threats.
These threats may be as specific as people making unauthorized changes that increase the robot's performance—making it move faster than its designers intended, for example—without thinking about the risks, or more generally as technology advances in new ways. They also subtly articulate the risks such as how a humanoid robot could threaten job security, or how a robot with advanced surveillance systems could undermine privacy.
Additionally there are the challenges of technology bias that has plagued AI for some time, especially when it leads to learned behavior that turns out to be highly discriminatory. For example, AI algorithms created a robot with offensive sexist and racist behavior.
Is it just because it is possible - we do?
Tesla's bot may seem like a small step toward Musk's vision of superhuman technologies, but the bold plans behind it are serious—and they raise equally serious questions.
For example, how responsible is Musk's vision? Just because he can work towards creating the future of his dreams, who's to say he should? Is the future that Musk aspires to bring the best for humanity, or even good? And who will suffer the consequences if things go wrong?
These are the deeper concerns that the Tesla bot raises for me as someone who studies and writes about the future and how our actions affect it. That's not to say that Tesla Bot isn't a good idea, or that Elon Musk shouldn't be able to flex his future-building muscles. Used correctly, these are transformative ideas and technologies that can unlock a promising future for billions of people.
But if consumers, investors and others go crazy with the brilliance of new technology or dismiss the hype and fail to see the bigger picture, society risks handing over the future to rich creators whose vision exceeds their understanding. If their visions of the future do not match what most people aspire to, or are disastrously flawed, they are in danger of standing in the way of building a just and equitable future.
Perhaps this is the constant lesson from robotic-futuristic sci-fi movies that people should take away as Tesla's bot moves from concept to reality—not the more obvious concerns of creating humanoid robots that work against humanity, but the much bigger challenge of deciding who gets to imagine the future and be a part of building it.
For an article in The Conversation
More of the topic in Hayadan:
6 תגובות
There are *two* major distortions in the article.
1. To date, there has been *one* accident blamed on Tesla. This is an amazing figure even for a normal driver. And the technology has not yet finished developing.
2. If an autonomous car were to travel at the speed of a human being, the roads would already be full of such cars today. 20 km/h is a challenge that the cars meet perfectly. There is no reason not to limit a robot in a public space to such a speed
Watching YouTube videos of Tesla's automatic driving, the achievements are certainly impressive and exciting, but on the other hand, the distance that needs to be covered to really get automatic driving will probably require a lot of work over many years, how many years? It is very difficult to tell from observation, in a rough guess from 10 to several decades, the same problems will also appear in a robot with a human structure, in a human robot the most impressive work was done by Boston Dynamics who have been concentrating for about 20 years on the side of stability and movement in a space with obstacles and this does not include automatic navigation in the world A variable dynamic in which people walk, mechanical animals cross the road, etc.. Maybe we need a connection between a system like Tesla's and the system of Boston Dynamics like in a person who has different systems that handle different layers of actions, one of the problems that needs to be addressed is a crazy amount of variables,
The human advantage is the ability to identify different variables and group them in a dream into a single meaning even if he does not encounter exactly the same variable, this is what Tesla in particular is trying to wait for, the question is whether the power of their processor can be matched
Against the power of the human mind? It is clear that there are situations in which they will have an advantage, but in the dynamic variety that exists in the real world, it seems that the human brain has another impressive advantage, in addition to the data that compares the ability to drive
of a Tesla car to a human driver can be misleading because the average of human driving includes drunks, aggressive drivers and more on the types of problematic human behaviors, when the real comparison should be against a careful driver who drives with the concept of motivated driving, it should be noted that for a large part of people who drive motivated driving can go on for a lifetime In a dynamic world without accidents one must admit from a technological point of view that it is very amazing if you compare it to an automatic system,
I did not understand what the claim was in the article. I'm tired of "intellectuals"
The bot is the result of a combination of Musk's companies. The autonomous vehicle with a supercomputer and the understanding of the surrounding reality will serve the bot without the need for further development. Additional companies for Musk's artificial intelligence will be introduced into the bot's brain. And it should be independent enough and connected to the computer that it can replace employees for example on the Tesla production line and save billions a year. This is the ultimate production line that works 24/7 without getting tired and at a high rate
In principle, the reporter is right.
The writer is not saying that the technology is not applicable because of these problems. He only asks: have they noticed the problems that may arise from it?
So indeed, a list of all these risks should be drawn up, and what can be solved be solved, and what can be reduced be reduced.
If they didn't do it - it's a crime.
For example, to prevent unauthorized changes and 'overclocking', which may cause the product to behave differently from what was observed, to establish a committee to examine biases and offensive behavior of the product, as well as for all the concerns mentioned.
Very shallow article
It seems that the author is not the most up-to-date on the material
We've been hearing these concerns for 20 years - what's new?
Every new technology is dangerous to a certain extent
The name "Tesla" is attractive, so they translated a not very interesting article