Abacus | Is Elon Musk’s Tesla-bot a surrogate Rosamund Pike?

Musk claims his ‘useful’ humanoid robot is built for ‘boring’ jobs, but his deeper vision may be something more akin to the 2009 movie ‘Surrogates’

Telepresence is a relatively new business, now freely accessible though platforms such as Zoom. If Tesla gives it legs, we could all have our own Avatar

Reading Time:5 minutes

Rosamund Pike in Die Another Day. File photo

Published: 7:00am, 6 Sep 2021

That Hollywood is credited with predicting the future is something we increasingly take for granted. And it’s true, the props we see on the screen often do turn up in real life. That is only reasonable, since futuristic film and television is the product of the same creative imaginations that propel the invention of new consumer goods.

Here are my five favourite examples from my outdated DVD collection of movies and television shows – have a guess at the titles, answers below. Doors that open automatically when you walk towards them, lifts you speak instructions to that can answer back, and flip-up communicators – that is an easy one from 1966. The compact disc first appeared in a 1971 dystopian vision about an ultra-violent classical music lover and his droogs; the same director’s 1968 masterpiece showed us heads-up displays and personal in-flight entertainment.

A frightening vision of the future, but what’s the movie? Read to the end to find out. Photo: Haandout

In 1989 we saw the floating hoverboard, augmented reality and a flying car – all of which currently exist in some form, and if Toyota had not pulled out of the Tokyo Olympics, we may have seen their airborne automobile. Then there is the 1993 film, which I dusted off recently, that was loaded with imaginative consumer technology that is all around us now: slick gull-winged, self-driving electric cars, videophone calls, telepresence conferences, audio-operated consumer goods and a toilet with three seashell-shaped buttons and no toilet paper.

While movies are littered with predictions of consumer androids and robots, the one that lingered in my memory was Surrogates from 2009. It starred a youthful, CGI-enhanced Bruce Willis and a genuinely youthful Rosamund Pike, both of whom lived their characters’ lives through robotic avatars.

The difference between the robotic avatars in Surrogates and, for example, the androids that are made in Hong Kong by Hanson Robotics who brought us Sophia – the world’s first robot citizen – is that they are piloted from an all-immersive cockpit-chair, whereas Sophia is on her own. That means the avatars do not use artificial intelligence (AI) to think, act or respond, that’s all done by a real person – the pilot. The computers in the movie avatars just control the motor functions of the device to balance, walk, run, and in the case of Bruce’s character, pull itself out of a crashed helicopter to chase his assailant.

An engineer rides a real-life Hendo Hoverboard in Los Gatos, California. Photo: AP

Last week, Elon Musk attempted to tantalise his audience with a taste of a new product, a “useful” humanoid robot. Head-scratching followed and Tesla’s share price didn’t budge. After all, humanoid robots inherently should not be necessary to do repetitive jobs, you just need a machine for those. I saw an example of this with a task being given to a two-armed Kawasaki robot at an exhibition in Tokyo in 2017: operating an espresso machine that used those little flying saucer coffee pellets.