TESLA TERMINATOR
Hollywood-style robot made for manual labour – but Musk insists it WON’T pose threat to humanity
Having a robot to do all your chores does sound good on paper.
But one could be forgiven for feeling uneasy at the idea of having Elon Musk’s human-sized ‘Tesla Bot’ permanently living with you at home.
The billionaire entrepreneur said his newest creation was being designed so that ‘essentially, in the future, physical work will be a choice’.
But the 50-year-old was forced to reassure spectators at Tesla’s ‘ai Day’ event that the machines are ‘intended to be friendly and navigate through a world built for humans’. and Mr Musk even added that his team were developing them so people could easily overpower and run away from them if needed.
as an actor in a skintight body suit and space-age helmet pranced about on stage behind him, Mr Musk –pictured – said he hoped the 5ft 8in robot would one day carry out ‘dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks’.
Chores could include attaching bolts to cars with a wrench or picking up groceries from the shops. The bots weigh around nine stone (57.2kg) but will be able to pick up more than their own bodyweight, with a maximum deadlift capability of 10st 3lb (65kg). They will have a walking gait of 5mph and the face, which was not shown at the demonstration, will be a screen that displays important information or a human image. The robot would have ‘profound implications for the economy,’ Mr Musk said as he talked about a labour shortage. He said it was important to make the machine not ‘super-expensive’ but stopped short of putting a price on it. Describing it as an extension of Tesla’s work on self-driving cars and promising a prototype next year, the second richest man in the world, worth an estimated £135billion, said his bot would use the same computer technology and navigate with eight cameras.
But some questioned whether Mr Musk, who has frequently touted technology advances at showpiece events only to scale plans down later on, would be able to come good on his aims for the robot.
‘is the Tesla Bot the next dream shot to pump up the hype machine?’ asked Raj Rajkumar, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.