The Ultimate in Grocery Delivery
While the COVID-19 pandemic has been a dreadful experience for humanity, it has perhaps accelerated a few lifestyle changes that had already been gaining some momentum. One such is grocery shopping, a tortuous task involving examining and touching things that many other people have touched, and trying to anticipate what you or others might be desirous of days in advance. Of course there are some pleasurable moments during grocery shopping, such as discovering that Entenmanns is having a BOGO on chocolate donuts or finding mismarked artichokes selling for $0.28 instead of $2.28, but that is usually offset by screaming children in auto-like shopping carts or those wonderful folks who are on their phones while wandering aimlessly through the aisles, or those that pay with cash and coins and don’t bother to find their money until after everything is rung up and packed and the line stretches across the store.
Grocery home delivery services are certainly a step in the right direction, although leaving produce selection to a 19 year-old who has purple hair and two nose rings can be iffy, but even better are the services where you place your order on a site and they bring your groceries to your car while you remain in the parking lot. This does give you some time to check for missing items or to actually speak with the person that collects your items, but soon that will all change if Elon Musk gets his way.
As part of Project Dojo, the designation given to Tesla’s (TSLA) AI chip development program, Mr. Musk introduced yesterday an enlightened version of the Tesla Bot, a 145 lb humanoid robot, that is not only ‘friendly’, but can free you from ‘dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks’. The bot can carry ~45 lbs of ‘stuff’. Intentionally, the speed of the robot max’s out at 5 mph so if the bot suddenly decides it is interested in world domination you can run away from it, and even if it catches you, you should be able to overpower it. Rather than a face, the bot will have a screen to reveal ‘useful information’, will be built from lightweight materials and have over 40 actuators to allow freedom of movement.
Most important are the cameras, neural networks and systems used in Tesla’s ‘self-driving’ vehicles, which means it should be able to avoid running into almost anything other than emergency vehicles parked nearby with their lights flashing. Mr. Musk expects that such a bot should be able to perform tasks without explicit pre-training, easily responding to the sentence, “Go to the grocery store and buy chocolate donuts and artichokes”, singling out the arduous task of grocery shopping in his presentation.
We are all for the technology, which unfortunately has no timeline attached, although we are a bit hesitant about using the same collision avoidance software and hardware that is used in Tesla vehicles today, but more importantly we want to know how these new Tesla bots will deal with their elderly brethren, such as Marty, the Stop & Shop™ robot. Will there be a caste system where the Marty’s of the bot world will have to clean and oil their more sophisticated colleagues, or will there be a place where the ‘Marty’s’ go to retire, spending their days sitting by the window, waiting for someone to come by and spill a soda on aisle 14? Hopefully the Tesla bot will also have ‘enlightened’ abilities that will give it a ‘humanized’ moral compass, sort of a ‘woke bot’ that will be able to see us humans as the nice folk we really are and not a race of mindless couch potatoes that spend all day checking their Twitter (TWTR) account, or maybe we should just stick with Marty and get our own groceries. He is very non-judgmental as long as you stay out of his way and don’t block the doors to the stock room.
Grocery home delivery services are certainly a step in the right direction, although leaving produce selection to a 19 year-old who has purple hair and two nose rings can be iffy, but even better are the services where you place your order on a site and they bring your groceries to your car while you remain in the parking lot. This does give you some time to check for missing items or to actually speak with the person that collects your items, but soon that will all change if Elon Musk gets his way.
As part of Project Dojo, the designation given to Tesla’s (TSLA) AI chip development program, Mr. Musk introduced yesterday an enlightened version of the Tesla Bot, a 145 lb humanoid robot, that is not only ‘friendly’, but can free you from ‘dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks’. The bot can carry ~45 lbs of ‘stuff’. Intentionally, the speed of the robot max’s out at 5 mph so if the bot suddenly decides it is interested in world domination you can run away from it, and even if it catches you, you should be able to overpower it. Rather than a face, the bot will have a screen to reveal ‘useful information’, will be built from lightweight materials and have over 40 actuators to allow freedom of movement.
Most important are the cameras, neural networks and systems used in Tesla’s ‘self-driving’ vehicles, which means it should be able to avoid running into almost anything other than emergency vehicles parked nearby with their lights flashing. Mr. Musk expects that such a bot should be able to perform tasks without explicit pre-training, easily responding to the sentence, “Go to the grocery store and buy chocolate donuts and artichokes”, singling out the arduous task of grocery shopping in his presentation.
We are all for the technology, which unfortunately has no timeline attached, although we are a bit hesitant about using the same collision avoidance software and hardware that is used in Tesla vehicles today, but more importantly we want to know how these new Tesla bots will deal with their elderly brethren, such as Marty, the Stop & Shop™ robot. Will there be a caste system where the Marty’s of the bot world will have to clean and oil their more sophisticated colleagues, or will there be a place where the ‘Marty’s’ go to retire, spending their days sitting by the window, waiting for someone to come by and spill a soda on aisle 14? Hopefully the Tesla bot will also have ‘enlightened’ abilities that will give it a ‘humanized’ moral compass, sort of a ‘woke bot’ that will be able to see us humans as the nice folk we really are and not a race of mindless couch potatoes that spend all day checking their Twitter (TWTR) account, or maybe we should just stick with Marty and get our own groceries. He is very non-judgmental as long as you stay out of his way and don’t block the doors to the stock room.
Tesla Bot (1) - Source: Tesla
Tesla Bot (2) - Source: Tesla
"Marty" - Source: Stop & Shop
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