"The core of Moravec's Paradox is not technology, but time.
It took evolution hundreds of millions of years to filter out the set of codes. Human engineers want to catch up with them in decades. The only way is to take a detour--
Rather than letting the robot perceive and adapt like humans, it changes the environment into something the robot can understand.
This is why industrial robots can be so successful on assembly lines, because the assembly line is a completely transformed environment tailored for robots.
The parts are always in the same position, the movements are always in the same sequence, and the light, temperature, and humidity are all controllable.
The assembly line pays off the debt of hundreds of millions of years of evolution for robots in one go."
He put down the tea cup.
"But Humanoid Robots is different.
The ultimate goal of Humanoid Robots is to enter human living spaces - homes, offices, hospitals, restaurants.
These spaces are designed for human body structure and sensory capabilities, not for robots.
Allowing Humanoid Robots to enter these spaces is equivalent to throwing it into an examination room selected by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The examination question is 'holding a cup of tea like a human being'.
It doesn't have those hundreds of millions of years of source code, so it failed the exam."
Elon Musk tapped his finger lightly on the table.
"So the design idea of Optimus from the beginning was not to 'build a perfect robot', but to 'build a robot that can continuously evolve'."
Zhao Chen's mouth raised a slight arc.
"Yes. The theory of evolution never pursues perfection. The theory of evolution only does one thing - to eliminate those who are not good enough and keep the ones that are slightly better.
Humanoid Robots doesn't need to be able to serve tea like a human from the start, it just needs to be a little better than the last version.
Then iterate, iterate, and iterate ten thousand times. After ten thousand times, the way it picks up the tea cup may look like a human being."
Elon Musk leaned on the back of the chair. Wind came in from outside the bamboo curtain, causing the hot steam of Longjing tea on the table to deflect slightly. He was silent for a long time.
Zhao Chen didn't urge, just picked up the teapot and refilled the two people's cups with new tea.
"Zhao." Elon Musk's voice suddenly became very soft, so soft that it seemed as if he was speaking to himself,
"Do you know why I made Optimus?"
Zhao Chen said nothing.
"It's not because the robot serves tea. It's because the human body is fragile.
Solar flares, asteroid impacts, nuclear war, plagues - any disaster big enough can wipe humanity off the planet.
If humans only existed on this one planet in the solar system, then human civilization would be like a piece of writing written on water.
So what SpaceX wants to do is to make humans a multi-planetary species.
But there is a problem with multi-planetary species - the environment on Mars is prepared for robots, not humans.
Before humans can set foot on Mars on a large scale, there must be enough robots to build the infrastructure.
Optimus isn't for serving tea. He's for digging foundations on Mars."
Zhao Chen The hand holding the teacup stopped.
He thought about Elon Musk's many reasons for doing Optimus - business, technical, and curiosity about artificial intelligence itself.
But he hadn't thought about this layer. It wasn't because this layer was too complicated, but because it was too simple.
It's so simple that only by putting SpaceX, Tesla and Optimus on the same drawing can you see the connections between them.
"So Optimus and Starship are two sides of the same blueprint." Zhao Chen said.
"Yes." Elon Musk's finger drew two lines on the table.
"Starship sent Optimus to Mars, and Optimus built the infrastructure on Mars.
Then Starship sends humans there again. Without Optimus, humans cannot survive on Mars.
Without Starship, Optimus cannot reach Mars.
They are not two projects, they are two phases of one project."
Zhao Chen picked up the tea cup and took a sip. The tea was already cold, so he didn't care.
The shadow of the Wutong tree outside the window swayed on the bamboo curtain, and the wind was stronger than before.
"I have sorted the core issues that Humanoid Robots needs to solve," he said.
Elon Musk leaned forward.
"First, hands.
The core end effector of Humanoid Robots is not a wheel or a suction cup, but a hand.
The human hand has twenty-seven bones, thirty-four muscle groups, and more than seventeen thousand touch receptors.
The thumb can oppose the palm, and the five fingers can move independently or cooperatively.
You can apply just enough force on the egg shell not to crush it.
You can also focus all your grip on the palm and fingertips when holding the hammer.
Optimus's hand needs to be even one-tenth of this level, the driver, the transmission structure, the tactile sensor, the control algorithm - every one of them is hard."
"Second, dynamic balance.
Human walking is not about "stepping with the left foot or the right foot". It is a process in which more than 200 skeletal muscles in the body constantly lose balance and regain balance due to gravity and inertia.
When a robot walks on two legs, it essentially solves an underactuated nonlinear differential equation.
The current mainstream ZMP criterion can achieve stable walking, but its energy consumption is more than ten times that of humans.
Human gait is the energy-efficient optimal solution that evolved over millions of years from walking on four legs to standing upright on two legs. The robot needs to find this solution.
What is needed is not just better motors, but deeper reverse engineering of human gait dynamics."
"Third, touch.
There are more than 17,000 touch receptors under human skin, and the density distributed on the fingertips is about 120 per square centimeter.
The robot does not need 17,000, but it does need at least a sufficiently dense array of tactile sensors integrated into the fingertips and palms to be able to tell the difference between 'holding an egg' and 'holding a cup'.
None of the current capacitive, piezoresistive, and optical waveguide tactile sensors can meet the standards at the same time in terms of resolution, response speed, durability, and cost."
"Fourth, energy density.
Humans consume about two thousand calories in one meal, which can support a day's activities. The current battery life of Optimus is several hours.
For robots to truly enter homes and factories, battery energy density needs to be at least doubled, and the efficiency of motors and reducers needs to be increased from the current 60 to 70 percent to more than 90 percent.
This involves simultaneous breakthroughs in the three fields of electrochemistry, power electronics, and precision machinery, and cannot be solved by any one company alone."
Elon Musk was silent for a long time. He moved the squirrel mandarin fish in front of him to one side of the plate, and used chopsticks--
I don't know when and where he touched a pair of chopsticks - and drew a vague line on the tablecloth.
"Hands, dynamic balance, touch, energy."
He connected these four words with a line,
"The order you arranged is exactly the same as mine."
Zhao Chen looked at him.
"Zhao, when did you start thinking about these issues?"
Zhao Chen's fingers paused on the edge of the tea cup.
When did he start thinking about it? After he was reborn, he read a lot of books.
As a reborn person, he knows better than anyone else that the future belongs to artificial intelligence and Humanoid Robots.
In the past three years, he has read all kinds of books - materials science, robotics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.
"The day I realized that the human body is a gold mine that has been underestimated for too long," he said.
Elon Musk looked at him without asking any questions.
The noise outside the bamboo curtain gradually subsided, and the shadow of the Wutong tree stretched longer and longer on the bamboo curtain. Zhao Chen poured the last bit of Longjing in the teapot into the cups of two people. The tea was already cool, but no one called the waiter to change it.
"Zhao, the next generation prototype of Optimus will be released next year. Then you can come to Fremont to see it."
"Okay."
Elon Musk put down the teacup and suddenly thought of something.
"What's the name of today's dish?"
"Braised Lion's Head with Crab Meat, large boiled dried shreds, squirrel mandarin fish."
Elon Musk read out the names of these three dishes in blunt Chinese.
Zhao Chen didn't smile, but he still raised the corner of his mouth slightly when he saw Elon Musk frowning and struggling with the pronunciation of the three words "lion head".