Elon Musk has said he hopes to use Tesla’s Optimus robot to follow people around in order to prevent them from committing crime.
Channeling several dystopian visions, the Tesla boss said the humanoid bots could serve as a form of Robocop that blocks what sci-fi author Philip K. Dick referred to as “PreCrime”.
Mr Elon Musk told shareholders at the firm’s annual meeting that using Optimus in this way could offer a “more humane form of containment of future crime”.
His idea involves convicted criminals being stalked by an Optimus robot that would serve as a roaming security camera to deter them from committing more crime.
“If you say you now get a free Optimus, and it’s just going to follow you around and stop you doing crime – but other than that you get to do anything,” he said.
“You don’t have to put people in prisons... It’s pretty wild to think of all the possibilities, but I think it’s clearly the future.”
Unveiled in 2022, Optimus is designed to be a “general purpose, bi-pedal, autonomous humanoid robot” that uses artificial intelligence to perform tasks typically reserved for humans.
Future iterations of the robot will mean that “physical labour will be a choice”, according to Mr Musk, making it “more significant” than Tesla’s electric car business.
Despite the promises, Tesla is yet to launch a commercial version of the bot. Production is expected to begin next year in California.
At the shareholder meeting, the world’s richest person described Optimus as an “infinite money glitch”, capable of increasing the global economy by a factor of “10 or maybe 100”.
He also floated the idea of one day uploading human consciousness to Optimus robots through his brain chip venture Neuralink.
“With the Neuralink, [you could] have an approximate snapshot of somebody’s mind, and then upload that approximate snapshot to an Optimus body,” he said.
“I think at some point that technology becomes possible. And it’s probably less than 20 years [away].”
At the same meeting, Tesla announced that shareholders had approved a record-breaking pay package for Mr Musk that could see him receive nearly $1 trillion if he meets targets over the next decade.
