In the future, everyone will have a personal robot to do their chores, serve them drinks, and perform all the dreadful tasks they can’t be bothered to do themselves, like... looking after their own children. This is what Elon Musk claimed during Tesla’s recent event at a movie studio in Hollywood. “You can have your own personal R2-D2 [or] C-3PO.”

The main aim of the “We Robot” event at the Warner Bros Discovery studio was to show off the electric car company’s new, autonomous “robotaxi”, the Cybercab. Elon himself took a lap around the parking lot in the car, which is due to arrive before 2027, with a 20-passenger Robovan set to follow. Talking about the introduction of autonomous driving to Tesla’s other vehicles, he said: ​​“With autonomy, you get your time back. It’ll save lives, a lot of lives, and prevent injuries.”

Another proposed time-saving device is Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus. You might remember the £23,000 robot from staggering around on stage in 2022, or learning to pick up an egg in 2023. To be fair, the robots do seem to have improved pretty rapidly since then, as demonstrated when they waddled out among the crowd at the Hollywood event, to mingle and apparently talk to guests, pour drinks, pose for selfies, and perform a dance number (stop making robots cute).

“One of the things we wanted to show tonight was that Optimus is not a canned video, it’s not walled off,” Musk explained. “The Optimus robots will walk among you. Please be nice to the Optimus robots.”

The dream, the billionaire suggests, is for everyone to own an Optimus at some point (as long as they can fork out $20,000 to $30,000). “It will be able to do anything you want,” he says in a video posted to X. “It can be a teacher, babysit your kids, walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.”

Does this sound like the beginning of a dystopian I, Robot reality? A bit, yeah. And in the face of widespread automation, it also seems like quite a strange list of priorities. Shouldn’t robots be taking up the less meaningful jobs, and allowing you to spend more time walking the dog, caring for family, socialising with human friends, and looking after your kids? (Well…) In any case, we’re set to encounter them in the next couple of years, if Musk’s timeline is to be believed, with Optimus going on sale from 2026.