The world made a significant move in direction

[Suff]

And nobody really noticed.

What am I talking about? Tesla held its AI day last night (Pacific time). So we all thought that it was about their self driving AI and their computer system for training that self driving AI.

We were wrong and right. Musk had hinted about this before but very few really took it up. I was one who has been going on for some time about how Tesla has been making an artificial driver and training that driver to drive the vehicle. Whereas the rest have been creating a very constrained driving environment for driving in then using a smart circus chimp to drive in those circumstances.

What was the info that Musk let slip? He said that they had it wrong, that to solve self drive AI, they were going to have to solve the vast majority of the entire AI learning world.

This is only logical if you think about it. We think, recognise objects, understand size, movement, relative scale, things which are moving towards us and away from us. We also understand behaviour (a person walking around a vehicle is likely to emerge from the side you cannot see), etc. This is the reason why we don't allow humans under a certain age (usually 16, 17 or 18), to learn to drive. Simply put they don't have enough real world life experiences and have not developed the skills to deal with them.

So Tesla has been working extremely hard to produce an artificial AI which is mobile, can recognise objects, measure distance, anticipate closing and passing distances and speeds and is aware of how it moves relative to everything else around it.

If you think about that for 5 minutes it should be obvious what the next step is.

Tesla announced that they are going to create a "bot". This bot will use FSD (full self driving), hardware and software (yep all the training they did for their driving AI). Recognising and understanding that people will be intimidated by these things, they deliberately made it slow and weak. A human child over 5 years old can outrun it and a early human teenager is stronger than it.

They then talked about the difficulty in training AI. It needs an incredible mass of data and that data has to be recognised, tagged and introduced into the training matrix so that the AI will understand it and be able to use that information. To gain this learning knowledge requires prior unheard of levels of power and data bandwidth.

The "computer" will be made out of "tiles" which are specially made processor grids in a special packaging. It is water cooled top and bottom and it has one layer entitled 18,000 amps. The Tesla FSD computer is 144 TOPS. The latest Nvidia AI chip is circa 1 PFLOP and the Tesla training computer is expected to parallel up to mulitple Exaflops. 1 Top is a thousand million floating point operations per second (FLOPS). 1 Pflop is a thousand Tops and an Exaflop is a thousand Pflops. To put that into perspective, my fairly fast Ryzen 3 home PC appears to be 0.000710 TOPS (64 bit, double that for 32).

Tesla says they'll have a sample bot in around a year. In Tesla time that's likely to be 3-4 years. But there is one point which people should note. There has not been a single "Tesla Day" where Tesla has not delivered the product they showcased.

I guess you could ask "why?". After all Tesla is a car company and it makes cars right? Yes but Tesla makes about the most automated built cars in the world and produces EV's faster than their competitors for the same workforce. All due to automation. Musk wanted full automation but it simply couldn't happen with existing automation technology. It needed robots with intelligence, agility, flexibility, sense of distance and movement. In short, the Tesla bot.

Then we should not forget that Musk is also the largest shareholder of a Space company trying to set up a colony on Mars. Tesla Bots, if they can drive in DownTown LA, should find flying a Starship to Mars a snip. Also Tesla bots, designed and built to manufacture stuff, should find landing on Mars and setting up habitats a snip. After all they don't need to breathe which means they can set up the entire infrastructure for the frail humans so they don't need to run the risk of creating habs in their environment suits. They will simply need the suits to get from the lander to the habitat.

This is a pretty big deal and it will happen in my lifetime.

Cool stuff!

[Workingman]

Another Tesladvertisement.

Yawn!

And you forgot to mention that Prof. Raj Rajkumar, who has been researching bipedal perambulation for years thinks that it's a "dream shot". Another that will be scaled back, as were so many others.

Having said that the concept is quite frightening and a bit 'Bade Runner meets Terminator'. I do not want machines doing things that I can do without any effort - driving, shopping, turning on the lights, mowing the lawn - I would like to live, if that's OK?

Siri and Alexa and the Internet of things are bad enough, now we are entering WALL-E world: FFS!.

And if we can do all that Mars stuff why send humans anyway(?) asked the lead Tesla Bot, do we need them?. "Girl, a couple of Plasma Colliders and a bag of silicon chips for me and Qark, please."

[Suff]

As you will see over the next 3-5 years, this is a peek preview of a product already in development. Tesla has dumped some ideas, but none which were launched on investor days. Tesla will use this to raise funds for the investment as well as to bring in talent.

I was surprised to find that lead developers in Tesla get paid up to $140k. That is not small and it is not lip service.

Tesla pushed out a new AI chip in 3 years and jumped 23x in performance. Everyone, including Nvidia (who's chip they jumped), said it was impossible.

I see bots as inevitable. In this case it is much like SpaceX and the moon landing contracts. SpaceX doesn't need the contracts to develop starship because the goal of SpaceX is not to consume government money and deliver lip service. SpaceX is going to Mars with Starship. Tesla doesn't need to find a market for their bots, they have a market, Tesla. Tesla has 70k staff. US average wage is 153k but we can assume China is half that. Let's say 100k overall. That is $7bn a year on staff. A year. That is a big enough market for them to develop and shop bots. Everyone else is an also ran.

I have been watching both Tesla and SpaceX for some time now. In terms of progress on engineering fronts, forget bell labs, Xerox and all the other companies who took their space. SpaceX and Tesla are the leaders and they are not letting go that lead.

It's going to be a wild ride.

[Workingman]

It's going to be a wild ride.

Maybe so, but I don't want to be on it, and I do not want my children or grandchildren to be on it either. I would prefer them to live their lives as humans and not subjects of the bots: thank you. And I bet billions of others feel the same. I am with Sarah Connor on this one.

Nice body swerve of the points raised, mind you. Well done.

[Suff]

Tesla are creating low powered low speed dedicated bots to do jobs which are either boring, repetitive or dangerous that would normally have been done by a human.

As for self driving, this has been on the cards since the first cruise control. Everyone seems to want better cruise, better safety, better cars, but mention the car driving for the owner.... No chance.

As for the prof who thinks this is a "dream shot", so was the affordable electric car. So was a rocket that landed back on its legs without wings, typical siloed thinking. The prof doesn't seem to realise that once you solve the AI issues for awareness and ability, you have solved them for every application, not just for the one you were working at.

As for terminator and blade runner? Only if companies, or the military, want them to be. Because these bots will see the bored and malicious 13 year old as terminator. Not the other way around.

There is a point here which is being missed. These AI are not being designed or built for _self_ awareness, they are being built for environmental awareness. It often escapes the scifi world, but the human brain storage is still the equivalent of a reasonable sized ground floor of a one bedroom house (53 cubic meters), at current storage densities. Bots will never reach the level of awareness you are talking about until we increase that density by several hundred times. Barring sudden molecular storage breakthroughs, that is simply not happening in the lifetime of my kids and possibly my grandkids. Also centralised storage over wifi access is not a real possibility, simple to disrupt, threat disarmed.

Even then you need to have a marked lack of responsibility before we get to Terminator or Bladerunner. Although Global Warming may be the trigger for that.

Some people dislike IOT devices. I like them a lot. Forget your Dim Meter, my IOT sockets tell me exactly how much power I'm sucking through them, allow me to turn them off remotely and even set schedules for them. Witness my water boiler under the kitchen sink. Great idea but it is burning power all night trying to keep the water at 96C. One IOT switch later and my power bill drops visibly.

As for Siri, Alexa and the Google idiot, those are extensions of the companies that produce them and if you want to go into that world, well be my guest. I know many people who think they are wonderful. Personally I like a greater level of control.

This is where AI is going to get us. It is the people who don't even think about the downsides before making decisions to use it.

The bots Tesla will produce will be far less intrusion in our world than Alexa or Siri.

[Workingman]

Rubbish!

If AI takes over and bots can diagnose our illnesses then why have doctors and nurses, a recent report. Why have pilots to fly our planes, human lawyers to defend us, another report. Why have bus drivers and taxis if vehicles can self-drive, why have binmen, why have shops when the bots can deliver everything - also made by bots. Why have humans?

Dystopia is on the horizon.....and the biggest laugh is that those who are so against simple IDs for us humans are buying in to tracking devices in their cars to let 'Big Brother' know their every move.

"Bob went to the pub at 12:00 and didn't leave till 15:00". "But his card says he bought a round of four, two lagers and two bitters." "So did his mates during that time....that's four each." "Five cars left at about that time including his, Dave, Bill and Alf, they all bought rounds - so say there cards" "They must have all been over the limit then, can we issue retrospective 'over the limit' fines, because they must have been." "Get to it, Qark, I'll send the bots round."

You think that I am joking.....

[Suff]

No I don't think you are joking. I think it is an extreme edge case which may come to pass in 100 years or so.

[Workingman]

The reality.



The fantasy.



If the robot is to do boring, repetitive or dangerous jobs why does it look like a gymnast in a cat suit wearing a carbon fibre balaclava?

Here's the thing, I am a Luddite, and a happy one at that.

I do not need to be connected to everything every second of the day. I do not need my fridge to tell me I am running out of milk - I can see that. I do not need my cupboards to inform me of a shortage of breakfast cereal. I do not need to tell some pod to turn on the lights or TV, I have switches and a finger that do those jobs perfectly - press the switch one way and something turns on, press it the other way and the thing turns off. It's like magic.

I have meters for gas and electricity which with the press of a button tell me how much of each I have used in the last 24 hours - units or £s. I do not need to know how much power I am drawing from a socket every second. My combi boiler is pre-heating a small tank of about 2 litres of water to 37 ºC using the pilot light, which would be on anyway, so that when I turn on the tap I get hot water in seconds. The heating is not on a thermostat as I use the controller on manual, it is like a TV remote. I press one button for on and another for off. Actually my body is the real controller.

And if there is one thing that really bugs me about the modern world it is all those damned surveys whenever you use a service or buy something!

"Your feedback is important to us: how did we do?"
"You did what was needed, no more, no less, now sod off!"

I'll get me coat - natural fibres, obviously - and buttons, none of these zip or Velcro thingumabobs.

[Suff]

WM, we are closer than you suspect on this subject.

Yet there are differences. Such as the way in which services are delivered in France and the fact that a 32kw gas boiler with Pre heat tank doesn't fit nicely into your kitchen wall unit run, it requires nearly half a cubic meter of room space.

We have a 200l electric hot water tank and that runs 2h a day for us. But when we have visitors, the tank is on 12h per day and often struggles as UK people can't understand why if you go in the pool 6 times a day and shower 6 times a day and run the hot tap for half an hour at lunch time and tea time, instead of using the bloody dishwasher, that the house winds up with no hot water for 3 hours.

The hot water tank is sealed behind a wall and the power socket was fitted to work blind on an IOT power socket. When guests arrive I enable anywhere up to 6 additional heat programs right from my phone. Even more importantly for me, I can do this from anywhere in the world when my guests arrive and Mrs S starts bleating about hot water.

Technology, in my life, has to work or it is not used. However I do buy "smart" switches. For times like when Mrs S insists we only wire one switch in a room then bleats for years that we "should have put wires in for more switches". The ability to smart extend switches without wiring is invaluable.

When I turn the dogs out at night and switch on the lights on the side of the workshop with a remote, avoiding over 50m of cabling and a massive panel of switches at the back door where I already have 3 switches, this works for me too.

I don't do personal idiots and I'm not titillated by some moronic interface which will turn on the light in the same room I am in, especially when I know that the personal idiot team are listening to recordings of what the mic picked up. Not just what you are commanding but every other sound in the room like side conversations.

However, large chunk of what I do would not be possible without this progress. Like the mobile phone connected controllers for my two heated bathroom floors. Given the time and effort to set them up, having the config stored on my phones is important.

We are living in a world that is only just beginning to understand how technology can change the world we live in. For better or worse.

Refusing to engage in the change just means that someone else decides what you will get.

As it becomes cheaper and easier to build systems with no interface and to put all the smartness onto a computer (don't kid yourselves, the "phone" in your hand is a computer that just happens to make phone calls), then things like boilers, dishwashers and washing machines are going to come with almost no electronics.

You must recognise that one flexible microcontroller with flash storage will save billions in hardware manufacturing costs and put the software where it belongs, not burned into hard chips which must be thrown with the skip when the machine requires an upgrade.

This was seen with Tesla who do not use the same "hard" controllers that the other manufacturers do. When chips became scarce they substituted controllers and added new software to the stack to support them. Those who tried to cheese pare costs with hard burned solutions are reducing production, they have no choice.

This is the world we live in. Web 2.0 woke up investors to the opportunities. Engineering 2.0 (soft/hard) will have an equivalent effect. When your washing machine has no pretty control panel, just a display (or even not that for the cheap one's), the differentiator will be the quality of the software.

Think of it like this. Once washing machines are dd, almost everything else is motor and valve control. The variations are unlimited. In fact the difference between a £150 washing machine and a £600 washing machine, from the same manufacturer, is almost entirely software. Ignore the lights and dials and LCD, think behind the tat on the front. You know this as well as I do. Washing machine upgrade after 2 years? Add new features? Rent your wash program by the month, year? This model means they could make virtually indestructible machines and still get revenue from them. Something we all point to when cheap models only last a few months over the warranty.

Try thinking forward to the possibilities. Instead of backwards to only what is or was possible without technology.

The world is not hanging around. Head in the sand will not change that.