Tesla’s Elon Musk’s Optimus humanoid robot is doing a lot more – this time folding a T-shirt on a table at a development facility. The robot looked more than up to the task, but Musk shared a follow-up message shortly after he shared the video that certainly dampened enthusiasm for the robot family’s feats.
First of all, I can definitely fold shirts faster than this. Secondly, Optimus Prime is not acting autonomously, which is obviously the ultimate goal. Instead, the robot behaves here like a very expensive puppet, or at best a modern replica of the first basic automaton, performing its tasks through prescribed movements. Eventually, Musk said, it “will certainly be able to do this completely autonomously” and without the need for highly artificial constraints for the demonstration, including a fixed-height table and individual items of clothing in carefully placed baskets.
Tesla has shown off quite a bit of technological wizardry through the highlight reels the company has released recently, but it’s likely that all of them were highly scripted and pre-programmed activities, more of a showcase of how impressive the robot’s joints are. The functions, servos and limbs are more important than artificial intelligence. Elon’s warning, if you think about it carefully, actually amounts to “all very hard things are going to happen later.”
Don’t discount the difficulty of creating a humanoid machine that can manipulate soft materials like clothing in a manner similar to how humans interact with said objects; this could make for some good animatronics. But suggesting this puts them close to the realm where Optimus Prime will operate as a fully functional domestic servant, with all the abilities of a human domestic servant it could potentially replace, is like showing a video of a wooden puppet and adding “Sure, that’s pretty cool” Soon he will become a real boy.
Musk is known for claiming things will happen in a timeframe that makes absolutely no sense, but the “three to five years” prediction he made when the robot prototype debuted last year (not counting the year before) takes into account its current The state of the art and the overall state of the art in robotics right now, this is just a guy in a suit) is laughable.
Tl;dr — Don’t start redistributing laundry folding time just yet.
