Give Tesla a Break
We should unite in believing in a better future
Last night was Tesla’s first product unveiling since 2019. However, the Elon Musk of today is not the Elon Musk of 2019. Several articles I read leading up to the event were openly hostile towards Musk and Tesla, specifically calling him a charlatan. It is absolutely true that Musk has underestimated the duration of some engineering tasks such as self driving, but so did the rest of Silicon Valley, and unlike them, Musk always always follows through in the end. Look at Starship and Starlink. In under a year, Starlink went from being called “useless” by the FCC to a “monopoly.”
Musk, like many great inventors before him, dreams big and dreams about more advanced designs than are generally capable at the time. We need more people like that. They are who shape and create the future we live in. I’ve said for a long time most people dream too small.
But last night’s unveiling of the Tesla self driving taxi and some very impressive demos of their robots has so far from what I’ve seen only resulted in derision and hatred towards Musk.
To me, they demonstrated some very advanced technology. The taxis seemed to work very well from a few videos I saw shot from inside them. The robots stole the show though as they showed off very advanced lifelike motions. There was even a booth full of dancing humanoids and a robot bartender.
Yet all I see today is that it was all fake and unimpressive. For instance, people are claiming the robots were remote controlled. There is no basis in fact of that claim although I cannot refute it. If they were not remote controlled, it was an amazing demo of both hardware and super advanced AI! If they were controlled, they still showed the most advanced humanoid robots on the face of planet Earth and it’s still impressive!
Same thing with the driverless cars. Sure, they are demo technology. But besides Waymo, no one else has shown off such advanced capabilities or, even more, a car built from the ground up to drive itself. That’s a first of its kind.
It’s so rare to see a glimpse of truly advanced society and I got to see some from last night’s presentation. I don’t particularly care about the details. Musk was selling a vision, and it was a great one.
Yet, in today’s society, because of Musk’s politics, people are throwing mud. I find it backwards in general to be hostile towards other people who simply have different opinions but to deride someone’s significant advances in vision and technology just because you don’t like their politics? Give me a break. We’re headed back to the stone ages if people can’t get over themselves.