Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Had Too Much Fun Inside This 13-Foot-Tall Robot Exosuit

A reality show celebrity is the US president, global warming is gradually causing catastrophic changes to our world, and artificial intelligence is at most a decade away from achieving singularity. If that wasn’t already evidence of us living in the flashbacks of a post-apocalyptic novel, here’s a president of a major corporation piloting his very own mech suit. ?

Jeff Bezos in the pilot seat of the Method 2 - Bezos/Twitter

To watch him on stage, encapsulated in a 13-foot-tall robotic exosuit, Jeff Bezos looks far too joyous to be ignored. It’s almost sinister, the way he grins as those gigantic metal arms practice their rebel-tossing moves.

The Amazon CEO gleefully tweeted the above photo of him piloting the oversized metal suit from the company’s annual robotics conference on Monday. “I just got to pilot an awesome (and huge) robot thanks to Hankook Mirae Technology,” he said on Twitter. Other attendees recording the demonstration on their phones got to see Bezos climbing behind the joysticks to wave the bots arms, before asking them, “Why do I feel so much like Sigourney Weaver?”

Bezos was showing off his new toy at MARS, Amazon’s invite-only conference focused on robotics, machine learning, and space exploration. Called Method-2, the exosuit is built by South Korea-based Hankook Mirae, with one of the designers being Vitaly Bulgarov, a concept artist who’s worked on films like Ghost In the Shell and Transformers 4: Age of Extinction.

Hankook Mirae Technology

So far, there’s no credible evidence the robot is anything more than a showpiece for Amazon. While it can take slow, shaky steps (support chains on the shoulders anchor it in place), and swing its arms about relatively fluidly, there’s no indication it could actually lift heavy objects relative to its size.

However, that’s not something that should stop someone like Jeff Bezos. As the CEO of both Amazon and the Blue Origin space corporation, as well as being the third-richest person in the world, he could impulsively order a few of these without thinking twice. The same goes for other similarly eccentric technology billionaires like Elon Musk, who might purchase what’s in actuality a glorified metal puppet just for kicks.

But if you had the fortune to spare, who wouldn’t want their very own mech suit to show off to their friends? Just look at how happy?Overwatch’s D.Va is with her own.