"Zhao." Elon Musk's voice came from the back seat, with a kind of relaxation that only emerges after the fatigue fades.
"Hmm."
"Magic City What's delicious?"
Zhao Chen turned his head and glanced at him in the rearview mirror.
"Huaiyang Cuisine, do you want to eat or not?"
Elon Musk leaned against the headrest, with an arc at the corner of his mouth.
"As long as it's not a social occasion, you can eat whatever you want."
Zhao Chen took him to a Huaiyang Restaurant restaurant near Hongqiao.
The facade is not big, it is opened behind a row of Wutong trees, and the words on the signboard are half obscured by the shadow of the trees.
The boss recognized Zhao Chen and saw him walking in with a foreigner in a black jacket. He didn't ask anything.
They were led directly to the innermost semi-open private room separated by a bamboo curtain.
When the bamboo curtains were lowered, the sounds of glasses and cups in the lobby were filtered into a low background sound, like listening to the noise on the shore through the water.
The dish was ordered by Zhao Chen.
Braised Lion's Head with Crab Meat, large boiled dried shredded silk, squirrel mandarin fish, a plate of boiled dried shredded silk, a pot of Longjing.
Elon Musk didn't use chopsticks, Zhao Chen asked the waiter to bring him a knife and fork.
He cut the lion's head into small pieces with a fork, chewed it a few times, and his eyes lit up slightly.
"Is this pork?"
"Pork, crabmeal, stewed in stock."
Elon Musk cut another piece and chewed it slowly. The shadow of the Wutong tree outside the window was cast on the bamboo curtain by the street lamp. When the wind passed by, the shadow swayed slightly.
The topic started from the moment Zhao Chen picked up the tea cup.
Elon Musk put down his fork, leaned on the back of the chair, and his eyes fell on the shaking figures outside the bamboo curtain.
"Zhao, when do you think Humanoid Robots can really join the family?"
Zhao Chen's hand holding the teacup paused for a moment.
Not because the question was too big, but because he didn't expect Elon Musk to ask this question behind the bamboo curtain of Magic City and Huaiyang Restaurant, among a plate of lion heads and squirrel mandarin fish.
But when I think about it carefully, I feel that this is Elon Musk--
He never leaves questions until the "appropriate occasion" to ask them, he asks them as soon as they come to mind, no matter whether it is the bamboo curtain of Huaiyang Restaurant or the control center of SpaceX on the other side.
Zhao Chen put down the tea cup and slowly turned his fingers around the rim of the cup.
"You know the technical bottlenecks better than I do.
Drivers, reducers, sensors, power density, computing power - every one of them is a hard nut."
He paused, "But the really difficult part of Humanoid Robots is not these."
"What is it?"
"It's about picking up this cup of tea."
Zhao Chen stretched out his hand, pinched the rim of the tea cup with his thumb and forefinger, picked it up, moved it to his mouth, took a sip, and then put it back on the table.
The whole process takes about three seconds, the joints of the fingers, the angle of the wrist, the muscles of the forearm, the fulcrum of the elbow, the tilt of the teacup, the distance from the liquid level to the lips, and the strength of the bottom of the cup touching the table when it is put down -
Every parameter is changing, and every change is automatically corrected by the brain within milliseconds.
"Humans do not need to think about this action because it has evolved over hundreds of millions of years."
Elon Musk's fingers stopped on the table.
Zhao Chen pushed the teacup in front of him.
"Picking up a cup of tea is the simplest thing for humans. For Humanoid Robots, it is by far the most difficult thing.
It's not because robots aren't smart enough, it's because humans are too smart - so smart that they don't even realize how smart they are."
He opened his phone and pulled up a diagram of human body movement Control System.
The cerebellum, basal ganglia, motor cortex, spinal cord, peripheral nerves, muscle spindles, and Golgi tendon organs are densely labeled like a city traffic map.
"The movement of the human brain Control System is the product of approximately 600 million years of evolution of life on earth.
The earliest vertebrates appeared in the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago. Since then, the two tasks of 'moving the body' and 'manipulating objects' have continued to shape the nervous system.
The cerebellum is specifically responsible for real-time movement calibration, the basal ganglia is responsible for action selection and initiation, the motor cortex issues instructions, and the spinal cord and peripheral nerves are responsible for execution and feedback.
This entire system has more code engraved in human genes than all the computer codes ever written by humans combined."
He clicked on another picture.
"The history of mankind being aware of the existence of this system is less than two hundred years.
Humanoid Robots If you want to "pick up a cup of tea", you are not writing a new set of code, but using knowledge that is less than two hundred years old.
To reverse engineer an operating system that has evolved over 600 million years and that humans themselves have not yet fully understood."
Elon Musk enlarged the picture and lightly tapped his finger on the cerebellum.
"Moravec's Paradox."
Zhao Chen nodded.
In 1988, Hans Moravec wrote a book called "Mind Children". There is a passage in it to the effect of--
It would be relatively easy to get a computer to perform at an adult level on an intelligence test or play chess,
But it is extremely difficult or even impossible to give a computer the perception and action capabilities of a one-year-old child.
Later this passage was summarized as Moravec's Paradox:
What is easy for humans is extremely difficult for artificial intelligence;
What is difficult for humans is easy for artificial intelligence.
"Playing chess, solving math problems, writing code - these things that humans need to learn specifically and only a few people can master, artificial intelligence can already do.
Because these skills only have a history of thousands or even hundreds of years, they are the most recent additional functions of the human neocortex, and they are things at the 'software' level.
But serving tea, walking, recognizing faces, and understanding tones--these things that humans can naturally master from infancy, artificial intelligence has not yet been able to do well.
Because these skills have been engraved in genes for hundreds of millions of years, they are things at the 'hardware' level, the operating system itself."
He stretched out his hand, took the teacup in front of Elon Musk, and placed it in front of him.
"A one-year-old child, seeing a glass of water on the table, will reach out to grab it.
Her hand will open to a width slightly larger than the diameter of the cup, and her fingers will slow down when approaching the wall of the cup.
The moment it touches the cup wall, the grip force will be adjusted based on tactile feedback. During the process of picking up the cup, the wrist angle will be adjusted in real time based on the change in the center of gravity of the cup.
If the water is too hot she will shrink her hand, if the cup slips she will tighten her fingers, if someone calls her nearby she will turn her head -
At the same time, the cup is still held firmly in my hand."
He let go of the tea cup.
"What a one-year-old child can do, the world's most advanced Humanoid Robots has invested several Ten-Billion-US-Dollar R&D funds, but it still can't do it.
It's not that the computing power is insufficient, it's that the source code given to humans by the theory of evolution is not available to robots.
Things that took humans hundreds of millions of years to evolve cannot be caught up in just a few decades.
This is not an engineering issue, this is a timing issue."
Elon Musk was silent for a long time.
The noise outside the bamboo curtain floats in the background, like a far, far river.
"So it took Boston Dynamics more than ten years to get Atlas to learn the backflip," he said.
"Yes. Only a very few professionally trained humans can do a backflip, but for Atlas, it's easier than picking up a cup of tea."
Zhao Chen's voice is not high-pitched, but every word carries a sense of calmness after having thought things through.
"Because a backflip is a sequence of movements that can be accurately modeled --
Every parameter, such as take-off angle, mid-air posture, and landing buffer, can be described by physics equations.
As long as the computing power is sufficient and the driver response is fast enough, the optimal solution can always be found after repeated trials and errors.
But pick up a cup of tea - the cup may be in any position, the temperature of the tea may be in any range, the surface of the cup may be smooth ceramic or rough clay,
Someone may have touched the table while picking it up, or someone may have yelled to distract the person holding the cup.
There is no way to exhaust these variables using physics equations."
He picked up his tea cup and took a sip.
Only Elon Musk can understand his words, and only when facing Elon Musk can he have the desire to talk.