Elon Musk appears to love to hype — delivery, not so much. Go back and watch him introduce his Solar City roof shingles, which employees at the time called vaporware. There’s Starship, hyped as a game-changing leap forward in interplanetary travel, but now is mission-critical as a delivery system for a growing megaconstellation of 42,000 cheap Starlink satellites.
Elon’s most persistent hype may be around Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD). The imminent arrival was promised in 2014, 2016, 2019, 2020 and doesn’t even work in the closed-loop Las Vegas tunnel system.
How important is FSD to Tesla? Elon himself explains it to the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley YouTube page at 30:28:
Elon Musk: “But the overwhelming focus is solving Full Self Driving, so…Um, yeah. That’s essential. That’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money, and being worth basically zero.”
Zero is less than a lot. Perhaps George Soros was thinking about zeros when his fund dumped its entire Tesla position in less than a year. Who can say what sparked Elon’s bizarre subsequent attacks on Soros, or why it brought to Elon’s mind a truly stupid misquote from The Princess Bride.
Between SpaceX, Twitter and Tesla one might wonder if Elon is still laser-focused on this feature (unless he’s too busy racking up hours on Elden Ring)
With that in mind, I wanted to bring your attention to some thoughts from Rodney Brooks, who sat for an interview with Glenn Zorpette of IEEE Spectrum:
Best known as a robotics researcher, academic, and entrepreneur, Brooks is also an authority on AI: he directed the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT until 2007, and held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford before that. Brooks, who is now working on his third robotics startup, Robust.AI, has written hundreds of articles and half a dozen books and was featured in the motion picture Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. He is a rare technical leader who has had a stellar career in business and in academia and has still found time to engage with the popular culture through books, popular articles, TED Talks, and other venues.
The whole interview is a fantastic read about ChatGPT and deep learning systems, which is a much more complex topic than we’ve got time to dive into today (just stop thinking AI is cool or smart — it isn’t, and it’s not).
The conversation gets around to a very interesting point Brooks has about how this cycle of overhyping an advancement can sometimes lead to interesting effects down the road. After reflecting on our current truck driver shortage (perhaps caused by a sense three-to-four years ago long-haul trucking could be replaced by robotics), the question comes around to is Full Self Driving imminent?
Brooks: No. It is far away. I think the level-2 and level-3 stuff in cars is amazingly good now. If you get a brand-new car and pay good money for it, it’s pretty amazingly good. The level 5, or even level 4, not so much. I live in the city of San Francisco, and for almost a year now, I’ve been able to take rides after 10:30 p.m. and before 5:00 a.m., if it’s not a foggy day—I’ve been able to take rides in a Cruise vehicle with no driver. Just in the last few weeks, Cruise and Waymo got an agreement with the city where every day, I now see cars, as I’m driving during the day, with no driver in them.
GM supposedly lost $561 million on Cruise in just the first three months of this year.
Brooks: That’s how much cost it cost them to run that effort. Yeah. It’s a long way from breakeven. A long, long way from breakeven.
Never mind how reckless it may be for our lawmakers to allow any of these robotic vehicles on public streets, $561m is an eye-popping operating deficit.
Here Brooks makes a point that’s not often included in the hype — the changes to public infrastructure that must go hand-in-hand with any technological advance:
So I mean, I guess the question is, can even a company like GM get from here to there, where it’s throwing off huge profits?
Brooks: I wonder about that. We’ve seen a lot of the efforts shut down. It sort of didn’t make sense that there were so many different companies all trying to do it. Maybe, now that we’re merged down to one or two efforts and out of that, we’ll gradually get there. But here’s another case where the hype, I think, has slowed us down. In the ’90s, there was a lot of research, especially at Berkeley, about what sensors you could embed in freeways which would help cars drive without a driver paying attention. So putting sensors, changing the infrastructure, and changing the cars so they used that new infrastructure, you would get attentionless driving.
But then the hype came: “Oh no, we don’t even need that. It’s just going to be a few years and the cars will drive themselves. You don’t need to change infrastructure.” So we stopped changing infrastructure. And I think that slowed the whole autonomous vehicles for commuting down by at least 10, maybe 20 years. There’s a few companies starting to do it now again.
It takes a long time to make these things real.
It’s hard not to think of Elon’s hyperloop here, a project he made big promises about a decade ago — though perhaps not for the reasons we thought, as Paris Marx explains in Time:
[Musk] has a history of floating false solutions to the drawbacks of our over-reliance on cars that stifle efforts to give people other options. The Boring Company was supposed to solve traffic, not be the Las Vegas amusement ride it is now. As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
Several years ago, Musk said that public transit was “a pain in the ass” where you were surrounded by strangers, including possible serial killers, to justify his opposition. But the futures sold to us by Musk and many others in Silicon Valley didn’t just suit their personal preferences. They were designed to meet business needs, and were the cause of just as many problems as they claimed to solve—if not more.
Brooks has some necessary history that should spark ideas for how our lawmakers should approach all this:
Brooks: And as a species, humanity, we have changed up our mobility infrastructure multiple times. In the early 1800s, it was steam trains. We had to do enormous changes to our infrastructure. We had to put flat rails right across countries. When we started adopting automobiles around the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, we changed the roads. We changed the laws. People could no longer walk in the middle of the road like they used to.
We changed the infrastructure. When you go from trains that are driven by a person to self-driving trains, such as we see in airports and a few out there, there’s a whole change in infrastructure so that you can’t possibly have a person walking on the tracks. We’ve tried to make this transition [to self-driving cars] without changing infrastructure. You always need to change infrastructure if you’re going to do a major change.
Tax Musk. Fund Public Transit. Get a different result.
Okay, I’m through. See you in the comments.