“By the time we recognize what we’ve built we may find ourselves living in a world that no longer needs us.”
in October 2024 Tesla brought us all one step closer to the cyberpunk universe of Blade Runner with their Wii robot event a tech giant creating machines that blur the line between human and robot more human than human that was the promise of the fictional Tyrell Corporation a company that built artificial people replicants to exist alongside the rest of us bluring the line between machine and man they weren’t just laborers they were companions caregivers Builders performers whatever their owners needed them to be not quite human but close enough to make the distinction uncomfortable now Tesla is building its own replicants not in fiction but in factories Optimus is real and it is being prepared for deployment inside Tesla’s own production lines where it will soon begin moving materials and Performing monotonous repetitive tasks but unlike traditional industrial robots Optimus is not built for a single purpose it is built to learn and that learning process is already happening not just with Optimus but across Tesla’s entire AI platform the company’s real world AI is advancing exponentially and the clearest proof of that is in full self-driving for years Skeptics dismissed FSD as a fantasy but now Tesla’s autonomous Fleet is driving billions of Miles improving with every Journey every time an FSD enabled Tesla encounters an unexpected situation road construction a sudden detour an aggressive driver it doesn’t just adjust it learns and that knowledge is shared across the fleet making every other Tesla vehicle smarter overnight the system is advancing so rapidly that at Tesla’s 2024 earnings call musk made an announcement Tesla will launch fully unsupervised Robo taxis in the city of Austin by June this year no human in the driver’s seat no test mode just autonomous vehicles operating in the real world during that earnings call musk brought up a classic Fable he’s mentioned before I know people have said Elon is the boy who cried wolf several times but I’m telling you there’s a damn wolf this time and you can drive it in fact it can drive you and the same AI system that allows Tesla’s cars to drive themselves will soon power Optimus if your last experience with FSD was a year or two ago musk said that’s like meeting someone when they’re a toddler and thinking they’re going to be a toddler forever now Optimus is still young but it won’t stay that way for long Optimus isn’t just another industrial robot it is the first machine designed to replace human labor on a massive scale during Tesla’s latest earnings call musk laid out his most aggressive timeline yet in 2025 10,000 units will be deployed inside Tesla’s own factories by 2026 Optimus will be sold to outside companies and starting sometime in 2027 musk plans to ramp up mass production with the goal to eventually build millions and even billions of humanoid robots as musk explained it doesn’t take very many years before we’re making 100 million of these things a year if Tesla succeeds this won’t be just another step in automation it will be a fundamental change in our own reality what happens when a machine can do everything a human can do but better faster and without pay this is where some long-standing pillars of society begin to break down musk himself has hinted at the economic implications at 1 million units per year the cost to manufacture an Optimus is expected to drop below $20,000 but cost and price aren’t the same thing the price of Optimus will be set by the market musk said and that’s the question that will Define our next decade who controls the robots and who benefits science fiction has warned us about the AI taking over for centuries technology has replaced human labor but always in narrow ways the steam engine replaced horses the assembly line replaced Artisans computers replaced clerks but Optimus is different this isn’t about automating one task it’s about automating all tasks a machine that can clean cook carry repair build and assist isn’t just a tool it’s a worker and when it arrives by the millions it will challenge the most fundamental concept of modern civilization work if robots can do everything what do people do musk has said the future is going to be incredibly different from the past that’s for sure but are we heading toward a dystopian nightmare or are utopian dreams that moment has not arrived yet Humanity still holds the wheel for now but if Tesla’s plan succeeds it will no longer be our decision to make and that change might be coming sooner than anyone expects to understand just how we got to this moment we have to look back at the origins of Optimus at Tesla’s obsession with AI and Robotics and at the long road that led us to the age of humanoid machines Tesla isn’t just a car company it never was for years they were building something much bigger something most people missed because while the world was watching Tesla’s self-driving cars Tesla was actually building robots it began with a car not just any car but a car that could see in 2014 Tesla rolled autopilot 1 it could keep you in your lane adjust speed and avoid collisions it was futuristic impressive and dumb autopilot 1.0 didn’t understand why it was doing anything it just followed orders but Tesla needed real intelligence in 2016 they launched autopilot 2.0 more cameras more data but it still wasn’t learning so in 2019 Tesla built its own AI chip a neural processor designed to process real world data in real time this this was autopilot 3.0 the moment Tesla stopped being just a car company and became an AI company Tesla’s AI wasn’t just reacting anymore it was predicting then in 2021 Tesla made its boldest move yet they killed radar no more sensors no more crutches just cameras critics called it Reckless Tesla called it Tesla Vision a car that saw and responded the way humans did this was the moment Tesla’s AI truly became something different no longer a set of programmed rules but an intelligence that learned from experience 400,000 Teslas running FSD beta billions of miles of real world driving data and a new supercomputer Dojo designed to process it all faster than any system in history for years self-driving software was just that software Engineers wrote the code updated the system tested it and repeated the process then in 2023 Tesla stopped writing the code altogether FS beta 12 changed everything Tesla wasn’t just programming self-driving cars they were teaching AI how to think for the first time the AI trained itself it wasn’t following instructions it was learning from Real World Experience FSD beta 13 pushed even further Tesla’s AI wasn’t just reacting it was anticipating adapting improving on its own this was no longer just a self-driving system it was something else and if Tesla can train AI to drive why why can’t they train it to walk august 19 2021 Tesla AI day Elon Musk walked on stage and announced Tesla’s next product not a car not a battery a robot at first people laughed Tesla even brought out a human dancer in a bodysuit to pretend to be a robot then musk said something that made them stop if you think about what we’re doing with cars Tesla is arguably already the biggest robotics company and suddenly it made sense Tesla’s cars weren’t just cars anymore they were robots on Wheels now Tesla was putting that robot brain inside a humanoid body at first Optimus was just an idea but then in late 2022 Tesla’s first real prototype stood up and moved by early 2023 it was walking by midyear it could grip objects balance and sort materials then in December 2023 Tesla unveiled Optimus Gen 2 lighter faster more humanlike it could pick up an egg without breaking it then in 2024 Optimus started working in Tesla’s factories loading Parts carrying materials all while learning and observing throughout the process Tesla didn’t set out to build humanoid robots but they built an AI that could see then they taught it to understand then to drive then to train itself and now it can move like a human and now that AI can walk build and think what happens next for centuries work was wasn’t just what people did it was who we were farmers Builders shopkeepers drivers the kind of work changed but the rules stayed the same you don’t work you don’t eat Tesla it’s about to break that rule if Elon Musk is Right 100 million humanoid robots could be rolling off of production lines every year machines that can build clean cook repair and even replace entire Industries overnight this isn’t automation like anything we’ve seen before it’s not a steam engine a fact robot or a self-checkout machine this is the replacement of human labor itself every automation revolution has followed a pattern some jobs disappear but new ones emerge factories wiped out blacksmiths but created industrial workers computers killed typewriters but made software Engineers what happens when there’s no new job left to fill right now robots do specific jobs an industrial arm welds a Roomba vacuums a chatbot answers basic questions but Optimus isn’t like that it’s not just one tool it’s every tool musk claims Optimus will cost less than $20,000 to produce a single robot at that price could replace a human worker permanently for less than a year’s salary and when businesses realize this why hire people at all at first it’ll be predictable warehouses factories Logistics but then the floodgates open retail clerks gone Hotel staff automated construction Crews small are faster cheaper and then nurses assistants drivers mechanics the cost of human labor collapses but so does everything built around it if work disappears what happens next enter Universal basic income here’s the idea if robots take the jobs people still need money so they get a monthly stien provided for them no strings attached it’s actually not some radical Fringe concept either in 1970 Richard Nixon almost almost passed a version of it in Congress in 2019 Andrew Yang ran for president on it Jack dorsy Mark Zuckerberg even Jeff Bezos have hinted that automation May Force Ubi into reality because if there are no jobs left to earn wages the entire system breaks down mortgages health insurance retirement savings everything collapses when work is no longer a path to survival the alternative Mass homelessness deepening economic divides and a labor force with nothing left to offer but desperation so how do we get to a place where everyone is provided a basic income to meet their daily needs and what happens to society without the human drive to survive who pays for it the government corporations does a Tesla optimized economy mean that its growing fortunes are taxed at a high rate enough to support the rest of the nation and if corporations don’t want to share what happens when people with Nothing Left to Lose start demanding it the real question isn’t whether robots will replace human labor that’s inevitable the real question is who controls them because someone will own the robots and that means someone will own the workforce in one future robots will serve everyone they provide abundance food shelter Medical Care all without the need for traditional jobs in another future robots belong to the few they work generate wealth and concentrate power in a handful of corporations that control the entire labor force a world where the rich own the means of production and the rest of society owns nothing in today’s economy the wealthy own capital and the poor sell their time in a world where machines do all the work what happens to the people with nothing left to sell science fiction imagined robots rising up against their creators but what if they don’t need to what if they simply replace us quietly efficiently and completely a machine that can mend a beating heart a machine that can write its own code a machine that will soon step into the world and never step back in Blade Runner replicants weren’t just workers they were Builders caretakers performers an artificial labor force that blurred the line between machine and man Optimus won’t demand Freedom it won’t stage an uprising but it won’t have to the most disrupt of Technologies don’t overthrow the world they reshape it so completely that the old world simply Fades away a world where Optimus succeeds is one where work as we know it ceases to be a necessity that could be the beginning beginning of something truly remarkable a future where survival isn’t tied to labor where people are free to create explore and invent in ways never before possible or it could be the start of something else entirely a society where wealth and control concentrate in the hands of those who own the machines while the rest watch the future unfold from the sidelines one way or another the shift has already begun not with a bang not with a war but with a quiet trade a slow seamless handoff from Human to machine and by the time we recognize what we’ve built we may find ourselves living in a world that no longer needs us or one where we’ve never been Freer