Tesla rolls out its prototype humanoid robot + Choose your (car) fighter: Apple v Android
Someone to keep Sophia the Robot company? Tesla has a prototype humanoid robot, Optimus, which CEO Elon Musk revealed at the annual Tesla AI Day yesterday, BBC reported. Optimus was shown in a video carrying out human day to day tasks such as watering plants and moving boxes. The EV company plans to put the robot for sale in three to five years with a price tag lower than USD 20k after a testing phase that entails working jobs in the company’s car factories.
The automation and AI drive saw the number of robots sold in North America rise to historic highs in 1Q 2022, Bloomberg reported, citing the Association for Advancing Automation. The automation push is expected to eliminate mundane tasks from human employees’ purview, but there are also the eternal concerns about job displacement: “Computerization increases the productivity of highly educated workers by displacing the tasks of the middle-skill workers,” according to scholar David Autor.
The Apple v Android battle will extend to cars: Cars, especially electric models, are experiencing a similar dilemma that occurred in the early days of the mobile phone industry with Google and Apple vying for software partnerships, the Wall Street Journal reports. It’s a dilemma for car companies, who can’t produce software anywhere near the level of Silicon Valley and are beating off competition from Tesla, and have to consider the real risk of ceding control over the user experience and any valuable data collected.
Our issues with smartphone software being limited could transfer to our car software, as the duopoly occurring on our phones affect our vehicles. Android Automotive, an operating system installed in cars that controls a built-in infotainment system, turns the screens in many new vehicles into an Android-powered tablet that runs Android apps customized for cars. It gathers data from the car like speed, battery status, heating and air conditioning, and more. Apple, which has a history of controlling both hardware and software aspects in its devices, may be pushed to create a CarOS to compete with Android Automotive in order to avoid putting Apple intellectual property in Google’s hands. However, this duopoly of software systems may have implications when reselling a vehicle, or switching smartphones from Android to iPhone.