In the utopia proposed by Elon Musk, billions of robots perform all necessary work. A network of autonomous vehicles and humanoids, fueled by solar energy, provide boundless resources. Poverty is eliminated. Work is optional.
And the world’s richest person would become the first trillionaire in the process.
While Musk has a well-documented penchant for overpromising, he has recast his companies to chase this future. He pivoted Tesla this year to prioritize building robots, phasing out car models including its popular luxury sedan to stand up a new production line of Optimus humanoids.
Tesla has aggressively recruited workers from other parts of the tech industry, seizing on specific areas of expertise — and development targets — such as mimicking the capabilities and range of motion of the human hand. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, which is expected to debut on the stock market this year, acquired his artificial intelligence startup xAI, which will build software with Tesla.
The army of robots forms the basis of Tesla’s push “to build a world of amazing abundance,” its new mission.
Musk has company. At least three different firms have made new forays into advanced robotics this month — including Amazon (founded by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post); Nvidia; and Atoms, a new startup from Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick whose mission reads:“Physical automation to transform industry and move the world.” Figure, a leading robotics startup, put a humanoid robot in the White House this week that walked the red carpet alongside first lady Melania Trump.
Musk is among a cohort of tech moguls that have seized on humanoid robots, which embody artificial intelligence in corporeal form, to massively transform labor-intensive work that cannot be performed solely by large language models. By applying the technology of the AI race to the physical world, they aim to unlock a new frontier of automation.
With the AI boom transforming office jobs at warp speed, tech moguls see a massive opportunity in replacing manual labor — upending fields that have so far been left untouched. Robot armies would be expensive to build and maintain, but unlike people, the devices would not take a salary. That has tech firms and their investors seeing dollar signs.
“Physical AI is the largest [total addressable market] in mankind’s history,” said Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum, which provides market research and advisory services. “I think Tesla is positioning themselves to be a massive winner.”
The tactic has led to a popular buzzword in Silicon Valley: “physical AI.” A Nvidia news release this month used the term no fewer than 15 times.
“Physical AI has arrived — every industrial company will become a robotics company,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement in that release.
In Washington and much of the country, however, the tech sector’s sudden emphasis on robotics is fueling concerns about whether it could wipe out vast swaths of an already-devastated manufacturing sector, accelerating declines over the last half-century as such work has been outsourced overseas.
Tesla and Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Ideas like Musk’s have come under scrutiny because of their potential to replace jobs. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called on Bezos to testify before Congress about reported plans to raise $100 billion for a venture aimed at AI-based manufacturing.
“Who is putting the trillions of dollars into AI and robotics research and development,” Sanders said in an interview with The Post. “It is the wealthiest people on Earth. It is Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos, Mr. [Mark] Zuckerberg, Mr. [Larry] Ellison.”
“Does anybody in their right mind think that these people are staying up nights worrying about how this transformation is going to benefit ordinary people?”
Musk has been maneuvering in the robotics space for years but only recently made it his auto company’s key focus.
Jon McNeill, former Tesla president who authored the book “The Algorithm,” which delves into Musk’s management principles, said while he harbors sentimentality about Tesla’s existing production line, Musk doesn’t.
“He decides what are the two or three existential issues in the business — and so at Tesla right now, it’s two forms of robotics,” McNeill said. “He does not have a loyalty to the past.”
While AI has spread into white collar jobs such as software engineering, it has yet to meaningfully disrupt spaces dominated by physical labor, where software and hardware must work together to perform complicated tasks.
An analysis released by Anthropic this month confirmed areas where researchers have found that AI is augmenting or could eventually replace workers — largely in office or clerical work such as management, business and finance, math, architecture and engineering.
Also notable was what so far has been outside the capabilities of AI — large swaths of the economy reliant on physical work such as transportation, food service, construction and agriculture.
“Many tasks … remain beyond AI’s reach,” read the report from the company that makes the Claude chatbot. “From physical agricultural work like pruning trees and operating farm machinery to legal tasks like representing clients in court.”
But Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, wrote in a January essay that it’s a mistake to believe physical work is safe from potential AI disruption. There’s already machine automation in factories, he noted, and predicted far more will be done via machines in the future. “Sufficiently powerful AI will be able to accelerate the development of robots, and then control those robots in the physical world,” Amodei wrote.
Maxim Massenkoff, an economist at Anthropic and lead author of the analysis released this month, said AI is rapidly improving at the functions that large language models are currently pointed.
“Right now, none of that happens in these physical tasks,” Massenkoff said.
But out of that reality, Musk and his boosters see a massive market opportunity that more than justifies Tesla’s pivot.
Musk argues that Optimus will usher in a world of “amazing abundance” that will make everyone fantastically wealthy, though it’s unclear how those gains would filter down to the masses. “With the continued growth of AI and robotics … we actually are headed to a future of universal high income,” he said on a Tesla earnings call in January.
Work will be optional in that tech-dominated future, Musk has said repeatedly, as recently as this month.
The company said it is racing to put the robot into high-volume production.
“Optimus will be the biggest product ever made,” the robot’s X account saidTuesday. “If you’re great at AI, engineering, or manufacturing & want to build this, join us!
To Boloor, the market strategist, the benefits of the humanoids will be worth the short-term pain. But he did not sugarcoat what it might mean for Tesla shareholders — and society at large. The company’s traditional cash cow will suffer as “the old business is shrinking away while the new business isn’t large enough to fill that gap.”
Meanwhile, as AI sweeps into the rest of the economy, he said, “job displacement is very real.”
“There’s going to be continuous job loss,” he said.
Shira Ovide and Ian Duncan contributed to this report.
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