While artificial intelligence has already begun to take jobs away from people in all major technology companies, humanoid robots still have a long way to go before they are truly efficient and useful.
Elon Musk released a new video on Monday of Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus folding a shirt. And although Musk acknowledged in a subsequent tweet that the robot does not function autonomously, it is still very interesting to watch for anyone interested in the future of robotics.
However, a closer examination of the video reveals that it is closer to a magic trick than a leap forward in the evolution of humanoid robots.
A trick video, like everything from Elon Musk
In the video above, viewers can see Optimus taking a shirt out of a basket and carefully folding a shirt with both hands.
Musk himself pointed out on Twitter that “Optimus can’t do this autonomously yet, but it will definitely be able to do it fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment (it won’t need a fixed table with a box that only has a shirt)”.
The most observant viewers will have noticed that something is moving in the bottom right corner of the screen. An engineer seems to be off-screen dictating how the robot should move.
Viewers can see a hand moving within the frame, suggesting that there is a person on the right making the movements that the robot then imitates. This type of technology is not exactly new. In fact, it has existed since the sixties.
So, although it’s great to see a company like Tesla playing around with robotics, it seems like we still have a long way to go before sharing our homes with servant robots, a promise of the future that we have been waiting for over a century.
Optimus doesn’t seem to have capabilities beyond what we could do in 1964, not to mention the advances made in the 2010s by the Darpa teams.
Musk announced his new robot Optimus in the summer of 2021 bringing in a person dancing instead of a real robot, a decision that received a lot of mockery at the time.
Serious robotics companies like Boston Dynamics had robots that could do backflips, and here was Musk with a person in a robot suit. But many people still cheer on Musk, hoping that someday he can offer an affordable robot that can do household chores.
