Elon Musk's Tesla humanoid robot Optimus is doing more things: this time folding a T-shirt on a table at a development facility. The robot appears to be quite competent when it comes to this task, but moments after Musk shared the video, he also shared follow-up information that definitely dampens some of the enthusiasm for the robot's domestic feat.
First, anyone can definitely fold shirts faster than what you see in the video. Secondly, Optimus was not acting autonomously, which is obviously the ultimate goal. Instead, the robot here acts like a very expensive puppet or, at best, a modern facsimile of early rudimentary automata, performing prescribed movements to perform its task. Musk said he will eventually “certainly be able to do this completely autonomously,” however, and without the highly artificial limitations implemented for this demonstration, including the fixed-height table and a single article of clothing in the carefully placed basket.
Tesla has shown quite a bit of technical wizardry with the latest highlights released by the company, but the likely scenario is that these are all highly scripted and pre-programmed activities that do more to show off the impressive functionality of the robot's joints. servos and limbs that its artificial intelligence. Elon's warning, considered even for a second, actually amounts to "all the really hard things will happen in the future«.
The difficulty of creating a humanoid machine that can manipulate soft materials such as clothing in a way that approximates human interaction with such objects cannot be understated. But it's true that it's also something that could work well with animatronics. But to suggest that this puts them anywhere near the realm where Optimus will operate as a fully functional domestic servant with all the capabilities of a human domestic worker he could replace would be like showing a video of a wooden puppet and adding "of course, he'll soon be a real boy.'
Musk is famous for claiming that things are going to happen in a time frame that makes absolutely no sense, but his prediction of "within three to five years" was made at the bot's original prototype presentation last year (without counting the previous year when he was just a guy in a suit) is ridiculous given his current state and the current state of robotics in general.
Let's not start reallocating the time we spend folding laundry just yet.
