Forget RoboCop. Elon MuskA vision for the future of law enforcement skips the guns and courtroom drama and leaps straight into the uncanny valley of artificial intelligence. His pitch? Give everyone a Tesla Optimus robot – not to help fold laundry, but to quietly shadow you and make sure you don’t commit crimes. That’s what happened. No prison bars, just constant, AI-driven accountability.
“If you say, like, now you get a free Optimus and it’s going to follow you and stop you from committing crimes, but other than that you get to do something. It’s going to stop you from committing crimes, really,” Musk said at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting last month.
And he meant it.
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Before launching into the more outlandish ideas out there, Musk acknowledged what many were already thinking: This stuff sounds wild—and yes, he knows people will clip it, spin it, and take it out of context. “Some of the things I say will obviously be taken out of context and using snippets and, you know, sitting around, but whatever. I’m still going to say them.”
Kasturi wasn’t just throwing out ideas about robot butlers or AI-powered chefs. He was floating a radical replacement for incarceration—arguably one of society’s most connected institutions—a walking, talking, never-ending robot that enforces behavior in real time.
“You don’t have to put people in jail,” he added. “It’s pretty wild to think about all the possibilities, but I think it’s clearly the future.”
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Let that settle for a second. In Musk’s world, the criminal justice system could shift from physical incarceration to constant digital surveillance. Everyone gets their own robotic parole officer — but instead of restricting freedom, it grants almost everything. “You can do anything,” Musk said, “except crime.”
Optimus, first unveiled in 2022, is designed as a general-purpose, bi-pedal humanoid robot with autonomous capabilities. Musk has said that robots could eventually be more precise than the best human surgeons. “Optimus will eventually be better than the best human surgeon, with a level of precision that is beyond human,” he claimed. But that’s just one chapter in his sprawling sci-fi playbook.
