Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

Surprising absolutely no one, I hope. Credibility seems difficult to generate for Tesla events. Maybe the secret sauce for Robotaxis is a human driver somewhere watching the cameras. Like driving Uber but from the comfort of home, and it's easy to hit the fridge or bathroom between rides.

I mean, you definitely need people available to intervene even for a L4 or L5 autonomy, because they will get stuck (Tesla is not serious about robotaxis until they start staffing up a team to do that on a full-time basis). But actual driving? This link is way too high latency for that to be safe. The robot needs to be maintaining its own SA, and just calling the human when it doesn't know what to do.

It's AI - Actually an Indian

As I I see the delivery robot do it’s job... a game being played by remote workers doing the Enders game.

The terrifying secret of all those European truck simulator games.

Reminds me of a plot of device of the 90's movie Shooting Fish where they were scamming businesses selling an AGI computer but were actually controlling responses with a human in another room.

It's amazing to me just how far people will move the goalposts for Elon's perpetual grift.

We've gone from "you'll be able to nap on your morning commute in your self driving car within 18 months" to "they will always need a human to intervene".

Incredible

I don’t think the person you’re replying to said anything about Elon Musk in this case

I mean, that's a classic for literally centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

I mean, shoot me down here, but is it that bad of an idea?

If you're going to have an assistant or a taxi driver, and you start off at the base position of "AI is totally unreliable", then having a fully remote gig-worker remotely piloting your robot...

I mean, it doesn't seem like a massive stretch from what Uber does.

...and heck, having a 'remote robot body' is pretty cool tech.

I guess. As long as you don't use it to pretend its just AI for the meaningless purposes of generating hype about your AI that really isn't actually any good.

You may already know this but Heinlein wrote about waldos pretty early, incorporating it into several stories and books.

>but is it that bad of an idea?

yes, operating any kind of heavy machinery over a shaky wireless WAN with hundreds of milliseconds of latency and multiple percentage packet loss is, in fact, a bad idea

Not directly, but he and Tesla are unfortunately inextricably linked.

> Is it that bad of an idea?

Driving at 60mph with shaky internet connection? Absolutely.

Piloting a robot to fold laundry? Maybe not.

Allowing random people to pilot robots in your house with children around? Absolutely horrific.

It seems like there's considerable demand for human labour "below the API" that you don't have to talk to. It's kind of sad but people seem to get comfortable with it very quickly.

> Allowing random people to pilot robots in your house with children around? Absolutely horrific.

Your risk analysis on this is completely wrong. If there is some vetting here this is fine. No different than a babysitter or a handyman off the Internet

Elon Musk has displayed incredible prowess at manipulating modern internet media. He launched "tesla shorts" right when a few big short sellers announced their positions (I believe one of them also put out a report about TSLA being insolvent aside from income from pre-orders, and was proven correct by Musk years later) and SEO-ed them into the ground.

I would assume that several of the pro-elon accounts on most social media are actually either bots or shills. You don't need many shills to get real people interested.

The problem is it was presented in the most manipulative and deceptive way possible.

You're saying then that tools exist to scan and ping all babysiters and handymen across the globe, fingerprint them for version, lookup zero-days, apply them to matching staff, exploit that to monitor children remotely, and take control over home assistants function to shepard children out the door to a "party van" ?

That's the ecosystem that surrounds most actual IoT devices - I can't see home robots being any different.

Errr, I am saying that Elon's claims are obviously BS until we start to see Tesla doing something like what Waymo has had for years(1): a team of people ready to intervene and fix things that are outside the training set of the ML.

I happen to know a senior person at a autonomous delivery robot company, which employs a team of people for just this purpose, because even delivering pizzas around a college town in a small little robot needs this. For things like (actual example for them) a sofa that was being thrown away and was just left on the sidewalk, and so a human needed to confirm that it was safe to move around it. And so far as I'm aware, Tesla isn't doing this, which is why I think that their autonomous taxi idea is nonsense.

1: Personal experience from being driven in a Waymo, I hit the assist button when we got stuck by some double parked cars in a parking lot. By the time someone answered the car had already extricated itself, but it didn't start that until after I hit the button.

Also reminds me of amazons cashierless grocery stores

Now I am going to be forever haunted by all those trucks I destroyed

The Pied Piper, in robot form.

Who gets a babysitter off the Internet?

Apparently at least everyone who keeps this website going, at least: https://www.babysits.org/

or you even have a single driver in charge of 20 vehicles, waiting for one of them to encounter a situation the system can't handle automatically

Hopefully, they will check for overemployment before allowing them to remotely control, otherwise we end up with one operator controlling several cars. I don’t know if it is good or bad

There are FPV drones, although I am not sure about their precision

My “vetted” Doordash/Ubereats drivers sometimes end up eating part of my meals.