Elon Musk’s Optimus humanoid robot from Tesla is doing more things, this time folding a shirt on a table at a development facility. The robot appears to be fairly competent when it comes to this task, but moments after Musk shared the video, he also shared some follow-up information that certainly dampens some of the enthusiasm for the robot’s domestic achievement.
Firstly, I can definitely fold shirts faster than that. Second, Optimus was not acting independently, which was the obvious end goal. Instead, the robot here behaves like an expensive marionette, or at best a modern replica of the first primitive automatons, going through specific movements to accomplish its task. Musk said that eventually he would “definitely be able to do it completely autonomously,” however, without the very artificial limitations present in this demo, including a fixed height table and a single piece of clothing in the carefully placed basket.
Tesla has shown off a fair amount of technical wizardry with recent highlight reels released by the company, but a likely scenario is that all of these activities are highly scripted and pre-programmed that do more to show off the impressive functionality of the robot’s joints. Artificial intelligence machines and limbs. Elon’s warning, when considered for even a second, actually amounts to “all the very difficult things will happen later.”
Not to mention the difficulty of creating a human-like machine that can handle soft materials like clothing in a way that comes close to human interaction with said objects; This could be some good animation work. But to suggest that this puts them anywhere near a world in which Optimus would serve as a fully-functioning domestic servant with all the capabilities of a human domestic worker he might replace would be like showing a video of a wooden doll and adding, “Of course,” that will soon be a real boy.
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” came at the original unveiling of the robot prototype last year (not counting the year before when it was revealed). Just a Man Wearing a suit) is laughable given his current state, and the current state of robots in general.
Tl;dr – Don’t start rescheduling laundry folding yet.