Tesla Bot

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About

Tesla Bot is a humanoid robot developed by Tesla designed to perform various tasks. The concept of the bot was presented by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in August 2021, inspiring viral discussions and memes shortly after.

History

On August 19th at the Tesla AI Day event, CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Tesla Bot,^[1]^[2] a humanoid robot designed to perform various tasks. During the presentation, Musk announced that a prototype version of the Tesla Bot is likely to be developed by 2022.

It's intended to be friendly, of course, navigate through world built for humans and eliminate dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks. We're setting it such that it is on a mechanical level, on a physical level you can run away from it.

Reception

On August 20th, 2021, The Verge^[3] published an article, titled "Don't Overthink It: Elon Musk's Tesla Bot Is a Joke," in which author James Vincent surmised that the announcement was most likely a distraction and an empty promise, pointing out that Tesla is unlikely to develop a functioning humanoid robot in one year while Boston Dynamics, a robotics company, did not achieve commercial deployment for their bipedal models after more than a decade of development.

Use in Memes

Starting on August 19th, 2021, the announcement became a subject of viral discussions and memes, with fan art of the Tesla Bot also being posted. In many memes, people commented on the robot's safety for humans and the possibility of it going rogue, with several references to the film iRobot, as well as on using it for sexual purposes.

For example, on August 19th, Twitter^[4] user @BBingBBoom7 posted a meme that gained over 1,400 retweets and 14,300 likes in four days (shown below, left). On August 20th, Twitter^[5] user @pollen196 posted a meme that gained over 200 retweets and 5,200 likes in three days (shown below, center). On the same day, Twitter^[6] user @RealYouTubeKids posted a meme about artists hurrying to create lewd fan art of the bot, with their tweet gaining over 220 retweets and 2,800 likes (shown below, right).

On August 20th, Twitter^[7] account @TeslaAIBot was created, posting messages as if written by the Tesla Bot.