DON'T OVERTHINK IT: Elon Musk's 'Technoking' Says A Helluva Lot About Media Culture

With no regrets at all, your MesaZona blogger went Boing-Boing push-button publishing a number of posts about THE TESLA BOT.

To be honest it was a welcome eye-opening event staged by Elon Musk, basically to say after the opening sequence that "This is not real"

. . ."Even by Musk’s standards, it was a bizarre and brilliant bit of tomfoolery: a multipurpose sideshow that trolled Tesla skeptics, fed the fans, ginned up the share price, and created some eye-catching headlines."

Don’t overthink it: Elon Musk’s Tesla Bot is a joke

A distraction and an empty promise      James Vincent Aug 20, 2021, 11:46am EDT        

The Verge

 

Insert After a dense presentation about the undeniably impressive work Tesla is doing with AI, the company’s self-anointed Technoking, Elon Musk, capped the evening by bringing out a dancer in a spandex suit. Behold, said Musk: my Tesla Bot.

. . .Do you believe him?

Should you believe him?

I won’t answer that for you, but I want to restate the facts.

> Elon Musk got up on stage last night and promised that Tesla, a company whose driver assist software is unable to reliably avoid parked ambulances, would soon build a fully functioning humanoid robot.

> Musk said that the machine would be able to follow human instructions intuitively, responding correctly to commands like “please go to a store and get me the following groceries.” He outlined these scenarios and then said: “Yeah, I think we can do that.”

> This was minutes after he’d ushered away the best demo of the Tesla Bot available:a dancer in a spandex suit.

> If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah.

 

. . .Once he’s got it to walk out onstage he can even send it to space, just for the headlines. But if he does, it will be just another distraction. Robotics are having a huge effect on manufacturing, no doubt about that, but there’s no need to pretend that machines need to look human to do so.

 

. . .Carl Berry, a lecturer in robotics engineering at the UK’s University of Central Lancashire, put things to me in less uncertain terms: “[Calling it] horse shit sounds generous, frankly. I’m not saying that he shouldn’t be doing research like this, but it’s the usual overblown hype.” Berry stressed that deploying robotics and AI in manufacturing usually required making the simplest machine possible: not the most complex. . .

 

. . .What the Tesla Bot really reminded me of is Sophia: the mechanical chatbot that’s appeared on chat shows and magazine covers. Sophia relies on misdirection to fool audiences and is a regular target of AI experts’ scorn. But it also has a job to do. As one of the robot’s creators, Ben Goertzel, told me in 2017, Sophia works by priming our imagination, encouraging us to fool ourselves into thinking the future is closer than the evidence suggests. In the process, the robot generates funding and news coverage for its makers. . .

 

“If I tell people I’m using probabilistic logic to do reasoning on how best to prune the backward chaining inference trees that arise in our logic engine, they have no idea what I’m talking about,” said Goertzel. “But if I show them a beautiful smiling robot face, then they get the feeling that AGI may indeed be nearby and viable.”

That feeling is what Musk wants to inculcate in his audience, be they investors or otherwise.

> His twist on the Sophia strategy is that he doesn’t even need a simulacrum of a robot to sell the dream.

All he needs is a dancer in a spandex suit. Now that’s innovation."