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The Conversation
The Conversation
Steve Benford, Professor of Collaborative Computing, University of Nottingham

Elon Musk’s Tesla is promising to sell a humanoid robot. It could be the first of many

Tesla's Optimus robot. Kittyfly / Shutterstock

Elon Musk’s recent announcement on Twitter that “Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year” suggests that robots that have physical human-like characteristics and provide “genuinely useful” function might be with us soon.

However, despite decades of trying, useful humanoid robots have remained a fiction that never seems to quite catch up with reality. Are we finally on the crux of a breakthrough? It’s relevant to question whether we really need humanoid robots at all.

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