Elon Musk’s Latest Robot Video Accidentally Gives Away The Magic Trick

Screenshot from a video posted to X by Elon Musk showing the Optimus robot folding a shirt in a ... [+] Tesla lab. Elon Musk posted a new video of Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus folding a shirt on Monday. And while Musk acknowledged in a follow up tweet the robot isn’t operating autonomously, it’s still a very interesting thing to watch for anyone interested in the future of robotics.

But a close examination of this video reveals it’s closer to a magic trick than a leap forward in robot assisted living. In the video, which is available on X , viewers can see Optimus pulling a t shirt out of a basket and carefully folding a shirt using both of its hands. Musk himself noted on X that, “Optimus cannot yet do this autonomously, but certainly will be able to do this fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment (won’t require a fixed table with box that has only one shirt).” Eagled eyed viewers may have noticed something moving into screen in the bottom right corner.

An engineer appears to be just off screen dictating how the robot should move. The human hand that appears to dictate how the Tesla robot should move while folding clothes. Viewers can see a hand keep moving into frame, suggesting there’s a person just off to the right making the movements that are then mimicked by the robot.

And this kind of tech isn’t exactly new. In fact, it’s been around since the 1960s. Below, I’ve pulled a screenshot of what it looked like in 1964 when Disney created an attraction for the New York World’s Fair with similar technology. Disney built a robotic Abe Lincoln for the Illinois pavilion of the Fair that was able to stand up, move its various limbs in life like fashion and give a speech .

And all of that movement was programmed using a person whose movements were duplicated by the robot. Screenshot from a TV special about Imagineers at Disney showing an engineer moving in ways that ... [+] would be mimicked by a robotic Abe Lincoln. So while it’s cool to see a company like Tesla tinkering with robotics, it seems like we still have a long ways to go before we’re sharing our homes with robot servants—a promise of the future we’ve been waiting on for over a century .

Optimus doesn’t appear have capabilities beyond anything we could do in 1964, let alone the advancements made in the 2010s by teams at Darpa . Musk announced his new Optimus robot in the summer of 2021 by bringing on a dancing person rather than a real robot—a decision that received plenty of ridicule at the time .

Serious robotics companies like Boston Dynamics had robots that could do backflips and here was Musk with a person in a robot suit. But plenty of folks are still cheering on Musk, hoping one day he might deliver an affordable robot that could do household chores. Tesla clearly has quite a ways to go to catch up to other leaders in the field of robotics, and it’s entirely possible that Musk and his team will catch up.

But the tech we’re seeing in his most recent videos isn’t much more advanced that things built by Disney 60 years ago. Musk didn’t immediately respond to questions emailed on Monday. I’ll update this post if I hear back..