Tesla boss Musk unveils his latest creation – a robot to do your chores
THE future seemed a little closer
yesterday as Elon Musk unveiled the prototype of a robot he hopes will be put to work in millions of homes within five years.
The Tesla founder said the Optimus android could perform basic household tasks such as watering plants or carrying shopping.
Pitching it as the first massproduced robot assistant, he aims to sell it for $20,000 (£18,000) – about the price of a small car.
He told an audience at Tesla’s AI Day event in Palo Alto, California: ‘We are trying to follow the goal of fastest path to a useful robot that can be made at volume.’
Audiences watched as the 5ft 8in humanoid robot slowly and shakily walked on stage to join Mr Musk, before waving to the crowd.
A video then showed Optimus performing a variety of simple tasks, including picking up metal parts from a crate and placing them on a table. Mr Musk, whose
£216billion fortune makes him the world’s richest man, said: ‘The robot can actually do a lot more than we just showed you. We just didn’t want it to fall on its face.’
A more advanced model, which Tesla hopes to put into production within five years, is still incapable of walking and had to be rolled on to the stage by engineers.
Although he admitted the project still required ‘a lot of work’, Mr Musk predicted the robot’s technology would be ‘mind-blowing’ within a decade.
He said the creation of millions of androids, capable of performing industrial and manufacturing jobs as well as household chores, would ‘transform civilisation’ and even eradicate poverty. Future versions of the machine, which uses the same artificial-intelligence system as the firm’s self-driving cars, could even hold conversations, he said. He added: ‘We want to have fun versions. An Optimus can be utilitarian, but it can also be kind of like a buddy and hang out with you.’
But the 51-year-old entrepreneur – who once described AI as a ‘fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation’ – warned that the company had to be careful ‘to not go down the Terminator path’, referring to the 1984 sci-fi film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killer cyborg.
He called for a regulator to police the safety of such technologies, and said he feared governments were not fully aware of the risks posed by AI. Mr Musk also said Tesla’s shareholders were another check on the company’s pursuit of AI, pointing out that they could fire him if he went ‘crazy’.