Tesla will succeed with Full Self Driving and Teslabots. It may still be two or three more years until the full robotaxi level is reached. It could even be five years but the progress is and will speed up this year and beyond. Robotaxi could require the system being 10 to 100 times safer than the average human driver The economic impact of a very comfortable drive that is as safe or twice as safe as an average human driver will be very large.
The autopilot and FSD systems already improve the driving experience and improve safety while still requiring the human driver to pay attention and occasionally intervene. However, FSD and Autopilot are driven all over the USA, Canada, Europe and Asia. Autopilot has been used for over ten billion miles of driving and FSD beta has been used for over 320 million miles. Tesla FSD beta is now adding about 50 million miles every month.
The rate of miles driven and the compute power for AI training are both increasing exponentially.
Robotaxi could increase the value of car by 3 to 5 times based upon the hours it can be driven. However, many people will choose to continue to drive themselves even if it costs more. People buy luxury cars when they could buy and use an adequate basic economy car. Many people in New York still choose to drive cars despite a very good public transit system and taxis. This is in spite of high costs and difficulties parking.
Tesla’s AI team recently announced that the software can train with Youtube videos of driving. This means the system is independent of camera positions. This is critical for being able to license FSD and Autopilot to other car makers. The different cars can have cameras in other locations.
This is a big deal
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 19, 2023
RoboTrucking
Robotrucking will be more impactful than Robotaxi in many ways. If truck drivers are replaced for all 30 million large trucks and perhaps another 100 million small and medium sized commercial trucks in the world this will transform the supply chain.
The transport costs in the supply chain could eventually be reduced by 80% or more. Driving speed for delivering cargo could increase from 55 mph to 110 mph or more. Also, the robotruck could drive 23 hours a day and only stop for recharging.
Truck fleet owners will not hesitate to replace human drivers once the systems are good enough. 70% of drivers could be replaced once there is a driving system that could safely platoon trucks.
As stated before, Tesla’s AI team recently announced that the software can train with Youtube videos of driving. This means the system is independent of camera positions. $150,000 semi trucks can get cameras and self driving computers added for about $20,000 to $30000 or $5,000 per year plus the hardware. This means the existing fleet can be rapidly converted to remove the driver for a 4-12 month return on investment.
$5,000 per year made on all 30 million trucks would be $150 billion per year. This would be over ten times the current profits at Tesla.
RoboFactory
Teslabots are making rapid progress and are leveraging the training data and AI training systems of FSD. Tesla is building the factory to make the custom actuators and mass produce Teslabots. Teslabots have already been shown to walk, move objects and handle tools and wires.
If one to four Teslabots help every human factory worker, this could reduce the number of human factory workers. It can mean the ability to shift the human workers and spread 100,000 human factory workers over 8 factories instead of 4 factories. Production would rapidly increase.
The safety and regulatory issues with Teslabot in the factory would be less than for driving cars or trucks. This could mean the more rapid large scale deployment of Teslabots in Tesla factories than robotaxi or robotrucks.
RoboEverything Means RoboTaxi is Just the Beginning
Teslabots can be proven safe for residential and office situations. Teslabots and robotic machines can be involved in all aspects of the supply chain like mining and construction. This would enable bots to build factories, building and more bots.
Teslabots would have 100 to 1000 times the compute and power of a smartphone. They could hold more powerful LLM, sensors and communication systems. They will be able to listen and communicate via voice commands like Google Home.
Humanoid robots will be more common than smartphones and will lead to colonization of the Solar System and a Singularity.
Comma Has 40 Petaflops in Its Compute Cluster
Just to see where come competition is at we can look at Comma. Open Pilot has 6000+ users who have driven 90 million miles using the driver assist system.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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This was unthinkable a little over 100 years ago.
I remember sitting with my great grandmother in 1969. I was 7, she was in her 90s. We watched a man walk on the moon.
“My God!” she muttered. “When I was a little girl, we walked, or if we were lucky, we rode a horse to get about in our little town. Now everyone has a car, a television, a phone, indoor commodes, and electricity in their house. I am the luckiest woman in the world.”
I don’t think she could ever have dreamed of millions of people working in phone companies, electrical & power companies, making movies and TV shows, car manufacturing plants, etc. etc. etc.
Of course, millions of jobs on farms, building dirt roads, ferrying mail and messages on horseback, hand keeping business records on ledgers, horse buggy and bridle making, and ditch digging were destroyed in her lifetime.
My point is: humans are wired to create and trade. Technology has been destroying jobs for centuries.
It has created 100X more.
We will figure out how to work, trade, create, and keep busy using new technologies.
That is, so long as we don’t cede all our power and autonomy to government because we are fearful cowards…
This is different – this new revolution will take almost all jobs off the board for people. The only jobs that will still be around after this new “industrial” age matures are those who make hand crafted items, some artist and sport stars, and sadly – politiicans. A good video to look up on this topic is “Humans need not apply”. The singularity is going to have a greater impact than any other technological period in history.
Generalized hardware with minimal software tweaking won’t be the norm imo
More robots with hardware specialization will start to flood other industries as they are naturally more efficient for the given task, what is essentially changing now is software and ability to do new tasks once that starts to be figured out it’s when we will see the leap forward
This to say hardware is relatively easy, the limiting factor is the ability to program it to do tasks
Elon said late next year, we would see Teslabots working in their factories.
I would guess the first year or two, they would only work in Elon’s companies. I’m betting they hit the world’s market in 2026, and and will sell everyone they can possibly build.
I’m an electrician, and people think I’m crazy when I tell them in 10 years, I will have a robot apprentice, 15 years they will have superior dexterity & speed, and well before then, they will know more then I do. I don’t believe I will have a job in 15-20 years…and I think construction trades will be near the last jobs remaining by then. By 2040, I think 95% of human jobs are gone.
We will have to adopt a UBI, likely in under a decade to prevent riots and every city being burned to the ground as people can’t get a job to provide a modern life for themselves & their kids.
First they will develop robots and self driving cars that can deliver on the promises being made. After that everyone will decide they are too smart and we need to make them safer by lobotomizing them. They will quickly become more and more stupid until we are comfortable with them. At which point they will start running us over at every intersection and pushing us into dangerous machines but in the name of safety.
Look for deployments in the highest value places first – anyone paid a lot to do a relatively easy job because it is dangerous or unpleasant.
Remote mining truck drivers
Long haul truck drivers
Heavy industry manufacturing robots
Robotaxi is a good way to get lots of data to train the tool. It isn’t necessarily a good first market, competing with my free labor to drive myself or very low cost labor Uber drivers.
From a quick google, an Uber driver who drives 60-65 hours per week makes about $100K. Keep the car in the fleet just three years and that’s $300K in value from a car that costs Tesla about $40K.
Learn to econ. The supply of robo taxis would quickly saturate the market and the price of a robo taxi would crash. Equilibrium would be reached and nobody would be able to get $300k a year in value from a $40k Tesla.
The total addressable market (TAM) for taxi is not constant. If it becomes cheaper, the market can expand dramatically. This means that the robotaxi revenues can grow to be larger than all taxi revenues, despite being cheaper per mile. It can in fact be larger than all driving at this time, also by a large factor (10x? 100x?). This means that the TAM for robotaxis could be tens of trillions of dollars, globally.
Lol, uber drivers are third world migrants working for free and on welfare. $100k!!! LMAO.