Tesla’s humanoid dreams are powered by tired humans repeating the same motions until they stop looking “not human enough.”

Tesla’s Optimus robot may still move like a cartoon sidekick having an existential crisis, but the company appears determined to upgrade it from slapstick to semi-competent.

According to a new Business Insider report, that effort now includes a secretive data-collection lab inside Tesla’s engineering headquarters in Palo Alto — a place where human workers perform the same mundane motions hundreds of times a day so the bots can eventually figure out how to lift a cup without looking confused.

Employees as lab rats

In an industry already built on the often invisible labor of data annotators, multi-billionaire Elon Musk’s company has gone one step further: the humans are the dataset. Dozens of “data collectors” wear helmets loaded with five cameras and haul around 40-pound backpacks while performing tasks ranging from wiping tables to vacuuming to assembling parts on a conveyor belt.

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Then there are the more colorful assignments reportedly generated by AI: twerking, acting like a gorilla, or performing baby puzzles.

Truly the future tech pioneers imagined.

Former workers say the experience felt “like being a lab rat under a microscope.” Repetition is the job description: wiping a table over and over again for weeks before moving up to more prestigious motions. In each eight-hour shift, they must produce at least four hours of footage judged sufficiently “human,” or risk penalties.

One worker likened it to an endless loop: take a step, wipe, reset pose, repeat until freedom (also known as break time). He also complained that employees are told to perform Chicken Dance, a humiliating set of moves as many recalled.

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All this grueling mimicry supports CEO Musk’s plan to steer Tesla away from mere car-making and toward mass-market humanoid robots — a sector analysts love to call “multitrillion-dollar,” even as no one can clearly identify the trillionaires-in-waiting purchasing household androids.

Misleading investors

Musk has given Tesla an ambitious deadline: 5,000 Optimus robots by the end of this year, with the long-term vision of producing a million annually. He recently claimed Optimus could become “the biggest product of all time,” in spite of embarrassing videos showing an Optimus freezing in mid-action while grabbing a Coke for Tesla executives, then moving, and stalling again.

Despite all the training, Tesla apparently still doesn’t trust Optimus to act alone in front of investors. According to former workers, the robots are quietly teleoperated by humans during VIP visits to ensure they appear impressively lifelike.