The Retreat To Muskworld – E.W. Niedermeyer

Almost eight years ago, Elon Musk announced that every Tesla made from that moment forward would be capable of Level 5 autonomous driving with nothing more than a software update. It was a pivotal moment in Tesla’s history, committing the company to not just succeed as an electric automaker, but solve one of the most ambitious AI and robotics challenges possible. To create confidence in that staggering aspiration, Tesla released a video of a Model X driving around Palo Alto autonomously to the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black,” claiming that the driver behind the wheel was only there “for legal purposes.”

Eight long and hype-filled years later, Tesla is still looking for ways to build confidence in its ability to deliver a “general solution to self-driving” through hype and spectacle, even as companies like Waymo deliver the reality of 100,000 driverless taxi rides per week. Rather than meeting the competitive challenge from Waymo with real driverless rides on real public streets, Tesla’s latest ploy for credibility sees the firm retreating ever deeper into fantasy, building what can only be described as a temporary theme park on a movie studio lot for its first ever “driverless” demonstration.

This contrast is instructive. The “Paint It Black” video of eight years ago was no more “real” or “fake” than yesterday’s “We, Robot” demonstration, but at least it had the pretense of reality: it depicted a real car on real roads. Tesla’s latest spectacle likely cost orders of magnitude more to produce, but it didn’t even purport to show any actual real-world capability. The entire thing was pure fantasy, in a contained fantasy world, built on a movie theater lot that exists for the sole purpose of producing such spectacles.

Leave a Comment