The next step towards the future. Tesla introduced the humanoid robot Optimus at its AI conference. It can walk and wave a bit. In a video presentation, the robot showed that it can also lift boxes and carry them around. Musk, as always, was the salesman in this type of presentation, effusively praising everything and not using Twitter texts but live on stage, alongside his rather very quiet on stage engineers, also used the show for his self-presentation. The robot is "friendly", said Musk, it is to be used in the production of Tesla vehicles. In planning is but ultimately a consumer robot for the mass market, which can do errands or be a companion, for example. Musk clearly sees the future determined by robots and this as a very lucrative business model for him.
Amazon's new assistance robot Astro can be purchased, by invitation only, for $1,000 at the moment. Astro is a smart display, a roving security guard and a messenger robot. And all of these functions are based on an innovative piece of hardware.
Another area that we have seen are banana-peeling "colleagues" or coffee and pizza makers will now come into even sharper focus since the Covid 19 pandemic. Since more and more restaurant workers have thrown in the towel because they resent the abuse of unhappy customers and stagnant wages, concerns about a labor shortage have intensified since the pandemic began. For those in the restaurant and hotel industries who currently have "help wanted" signs in their windows, robots could be a promising solution.
On the one hand, it will further ignite the discussion between the trade-off, man versus machine. On the other hand, a labor shortage, due to low birth rates, for example in countries like Japan or in Germany, for highly skilled jobs will continue to exist and will not be affected by the friendly robots at the moment, because they will currently only take over simple tasks. It only gets interesting when you sit next to your humanoid robot in the office in the morning and he asks you when your presentation is ready and whether he should bring you a coffee, goes out for a moment and takes his break.