That was the old, completely unrealistic plan. I think the new, completely unrealistic plan is to just directly run a taxi service themselves, because people won’t buy the cars, so running a service is the obvious fix! Except for the fact that the cars famously can’t drive themselves, it provides a nice target for would-be vandals (you’ve got the people pissed off at robotaxis and Tesla haters!), people would need to sign up for an explicitly Tesla-branded service and the brand is still toxic as hell, etc. But other than that…!
“Sure, like everything else, we’ve been promising these humanoid robots will be out ‘next year’ for the last [redacted] years, but we can’t release them next year because of the trade war! Not our fault! If it weren’t for that we could totally mass-manufacture them in a way that wouldn’t be massively disappointing in both quality and quantity, we promise!”
I wonder how far along we’d be if tech companies put their energy into actually developing things like humanoid robots, AI and self-driving cars rather than scamming investors and the public into thinking they already exist or are eternally mere months away. I’m less and less convinced a good faith effort was ever put into these technologies to begin with, it feels like it was a planned grift from the start, with the only goal being to sell off shitty broken tech to as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Why actually make something when people will buy the idea of it and something useless that vaguely reminds them of that idea?
To be fair, these kinds of promises are totally the domain of Elon and his fellow AI grifters, not tech in general. Real tech companies are slowly plugging away at the issues, not making absurd claims or having impressive but fake tech demos - and also not getting the attention and absurd stock value. Musk and Altman, etc. promise the moon and despite consistently failing to deliver, get rewarded for it - and because they’ve been getting all this money and attention for things they can’t provide, they’ve created a bubble that’s probably going to take a big chunk of the tech industry with it when it bursts.
You’re not connecting the dots. Elno plans to deck out all those unemployed federal workers in black jumpsuits with white plastic and use them as his “robots”. (Which, don’t forget, is a pan-Slavic word for “work/labor.”)
Tech companies might not, but actual industry certainly does. The defense industry develops humanoid robots and real car companies make great strides towards self-driving. With AI, it’s a bit more complicated, but I’m sure besides the machine learning that’s been going on for a long time now, somewhere real companies who make real products are also developing and finding uses for LLMs and GenAI.
Even though the typical truck owner doesn’t work on a farm or construction site, they often want to cosplay as someone who does, and that’s not what the Cybertruck has been offering.
Not sure this is even a joke because, seriously, Tesla literally started their “robot” project with people dressed up like robots, and even their recent demos of the capabilities of the robots’ “AI” was very clearly actually the capabilities of humans who were remotely piloting them, so it’s been humans pretending to be robots at every stage so far… I fully expect that, if they have a future, their products will involve human labor disguised as “AI” (e.g. Tesla “self-driving” taxis)
