[imagesource: YouTube]

Elon Musk, who is supposedly slightly alarmed by runaway artificial intelligence and has spoken about his fears repeatedly in the past, is getting his company, Tesla, to work on a humanoid robot.

“It’s intended to be friendly, though, of course,” he said during Tesla’s inaugural AI Day, which was streamed on the company’s website.

Showcasing some of the artificial intelligence and supercomputer technologies that it’s working on with the goal of eventually powering self-driving cars, per The Verge, Musk introduced the robot.

Tesla’s robot will be called, well, the Tesla Bot (code name “Optimus”), and will be designed at a “mechanical level” so that “you can run away from it, and most likely overpower it”.

Always good to know for when they eventually turn on us.

The company’s website says that the robots will be designed to handle “tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring”.

Musk added:

“I think essentially in the future, physical work will be a choice; if you want to do it you can.”

Yeah, I suppose I can get behind that.

The prototype will be built “sometime next year” and will be five feet, eight inches tall (1,73 metres), weigh 125 pounds (around 57 kilograms), and have a screen for a face:

Image: YouTube

Image: Tesla

If you are interested, you can watch Musk introduce the bot himself:

Sometimes Musk’s imagination gets ahead of him, like with the solar-powered Supercharger network, battery swapping, or robotic snake-style chargers that never really worked out.

But Musk also has some impressive drive, so who knows if the Tesla Bot will really make it into the world.

We might have to start calling it the ‘robots race’, with Boston Dynamics currently in the lead.

[source:verge]