Silicon Valley is racing to create The first generation of “humanoid” robotscooperating with many technology companies has hope Consumers believe they will soon have their own in-home robot helper to wash dishes, sweep the floors, and take care of all those pesky chores you don’t want to do. The unfortunate truth, however, is that if recent events are any indication, we shouldn’t expect robot butlers anytime soon.
The most recent incident I am referring to is this: Elon Musk shared a video The weekend’s X show appeared to show Tesla’s robot “Optimus Prime” (like a Transformers) folding a shirt. Musk seemed to hope that people would be impressed by this demonstration of automation, but personally, I wasn’t impressed. After all, most people can fold shirts. I’m not good at doing laundry, but I have no doubt that if I had a shirt-folding contest with Optimus Prime, I would beat him easily. It makes me wonder why someone like Musk would be willing to invest so much money into building a machine that can barely do what everyone knows how to do. To make matters worse, it turns out that Musk’s video was staged, although it’s unclear how.
Musk followed up on his original post There is clarification About the robot’s shirt-folding function:
“Important: Optimus is not yet able to do this autonomously, but it will certainly be able to do this completely autonomously in any environment (no need for a stationary table with a box containing just one shirt).”
While it’s not entirely clear what Musk is talking about, it sounds like the robot can’t actually fold shirts yet. Or, at least, it needs some human help to do that.
Commenters on X reacted to Musk’s video with a mix of admiration, confusion and derision. Some are confused as to how the film could have been made if the robots didn’t actually have this ability.a commenter joke: “Yes, but my wife can hold the baby while eating lunch and screaming at someone on the phone…can he?”
Since the Tesla robot was released a few years ago, it’s no longer a topic of speculation and excitement, but of laughter and ridicule.In fact, the first time the world saw the “Tesla robot” was Just a guy in a spandex suit. At the time, Tesla didn’t have a mass-market prototype ready, so Musk just sent some poor fool to a press conference wearing a silver Glider outfit.Then, when the robot’s working prototype used to be Finally revealed in Tesla Artificial Intelligence Day 2022, it didn’t do much except waddle around and nearly fall face-first in front of onlookers. Now, we know it can fold a shirt. Well, sort of.
In short: although we keep hearing A robot uprising is imminentall visible evidence continues to point in the opposite direction—at least for now.
