Optimus Subprime

Hoping to finally get that robot butler all those old science fiction magazines promised us for years? Sorry. It's probably not gonna happen.A number of videos have been doing the rounds on the internet lately of human-shaped robots that move in a way that is somehow both human-like, yet very inhuman at the same time. Advances in engineering coupled with AI (Artificial Intelligence) certainly suggests that humanoid robots capable of following commands will soon be possible. But remember, possible doesn't mean practical.Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Space X and other businesses that peddle futuristic dreams certainly thinks it will happen. Musk is the man behind one of those futurist robots, the Optimus. In an interview with CNBC earlier this week, Musk said that his automobile factory would soon have, “thousands of Optimus robots working in Tesla factories by the end of this year, beginning this fall.”Okay, Musk may be a visionary, but he is also the man who thought it would be a good idea to make an electric truck that looks like a toaster, so his vision is not infallible. The problem is, the human form is simply not practical for factory work. Or most kinds of work.Chris Walti, the first lead on the Optimus project, who left Musk's employ in 2022, explained the problem to Business Insider that the human body, “evolved to escape wolves and bears.”Not a lot of call for that on the factory floor. At least, I should hope not.“Most of the work that has to be done in industry is highly repetitive tasks where velocity is key,” said Walti. “We weren't designed to do repetitive tasks over and over again. So why would you take a hyper suboptimal system that really isn't designed to do repetitive tasks and have it do repetitive tasks?”This isn't a new observation. I remember reading the same argument 40 years ago in an issue of Omni magazine in a story explaining why we would never get robot butlers.Factories already use robots that don't look like people. AI and advanced engineering may make factory work faster and more efficient and may even replace the people that work there now, but they won't look like the people they are replacing.

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