San Francisco – Elon Musk recently showed off the latest version of a humanoid robot that the world's richest man said could one day eliminate poverty.
An Optimus prototype wheeled on stage during an annual Tesla AI Day presentation was mounted to a small platform. The robot, which remains a work in progress, waved to the audience and raised its knees.
“Our goal is to make a useful humanoid robot as quick as possible,” the billionaire tech pioneer told the audience at the event in Silicon Valley on Friday, September 30.
“There is still a lot of work to be done.”
Tesla was adapting its autonomous car technology to give Optimus capabilities such as walking safely or working on a factory floor, company engineers said during the presentation.
Another version of the robot, built with off-the-shelf components rather than Tesla-made parts like Optimus, walked slowly on to the stage, pumped its fists and thrust its hips briefly in time to music as if dancing.
“The robot can actually do a lot more than we just showed you, we just didn't want it to fall on its face,” Musk quipped.
Tesla is designing Optimus robots to be produced at high rates, pushing the price perhaps lower than $20 000 (about R360 000), Musk said.
“This means a future of abundance; a future where there is no poverty, a future where you can have what you want in terms of products and services,” Musk said.
“It really is a fundamental transformation of civilisation as we know it,” he said.
Musk, who once warned of artificial intelligence being a threat to humanity, said Tesla wanted to make sure that the transition to a society in which robots did the work and people reaped the benefits was a safe one.
“We always want to be careful we don't go down the ‘Terminator’ path,” he cautioned, referring to the blockbuster film about a killer cyborg. He said Tesla was building in safeguards including a stop button that couldn’t be tampered with.
He said Tesla would begin testing Optimus on factory floors, doing simple tasks like carrying parts, and that the public should be able to buy the robots in three to five years.
Musk contended that Tesla, as a publicly traded company, would be held accountable by its shareholders if they thought it wasn’t being socially responsible.
“It's very important that I can't just do what I want. Tesla's structure is ideal for that.”
Musk was reprimanded by the Securities and Exchange Commission after posting a tweet in 2018, in which he said he had acquired funding to take Tesla private, but did not provide proof or file paperwork with the SEC.
Musk is now is locked in a court battle with Twitter over his effort to terminate a $44 billion deal he made to take the messaging platform private.
AFP