Elon Musk’s Optimus humanoid robot from Tesla is doing more — this time folding a t-shirt on a table in a development facility. The robot appears to be quite capable when it comes to this task, but moments after Musk shared the video, he also shared some information that certainly dampens the excitement for the robot’s domestic feat.
First, I can definitely fold shirts faster than that. Second, Optimus wasn’t acting autonomously, which is obviously the end goal. Instead, the robot here acts like an expensive puppet, or at best a modern facsimile of the first rudimentary cars, going through predetermined motions to complete its task. Musk said that eventually, “it will definitely be able to do this fully autonomously,” however, and without the highly artificial constraints that apply to this demo, including the fixed-height table and a garment in the carefully placed basket.
Tesla has shown off a bit of technical wizardry with the company’s recent rolls, but the likely scenario is that these are all highly planned and pre-planned activities that do more to show off the impressive functionality of the bot’s joints. servos and limbs from its artificial intelligence. Elon’s warning, when considered for even a second, actually amounts to “all the really hard stuff will happen later.”
Not to knock the difficulty of creating a humanoid machine that can handle soft materials like clothing in a way that approximates human interaction with said objects. this can work fine animatronics. But to suggest that this brings them anywhere near the realm of Optimus acting as a fully functional housekeeper with all the capabilities of a human housekeeper she could replace would be like showing a video of a wooden puppet and adding “ of course, this will be a real boy soon.’
Musk is famous for claiming that things will happen in a time frame that makes absolutely no sense, but his prediction of “within three to five years” was made at the initial unveiling of the robot prototype last year (not counting the previous year he was just a guy in a suit) is ridiculous given his current state and current technology for robotics in general.
Tl;dr — don’t start re-delegating your laundry folding time just yet.
