Imagine you are a friendless workaholic tech bro with $200 billion and thousands of sycophants and children who hate you. So you solve the problem by inventing a robot friend that will perform mundane chores like watering your plants while you play games with your kids and your wife, the children smiling and laughing, guests at your parties happily accepting drinks brought to them by your robot, all of you just one big happy and loving extended family.
To say the last couple of minutes of Elon Musk’s Thursday night unveiling of Tesla products he will never deliver had a lot going on psychologically might be understating the case. Having introduced his robo-cab and robo-van, which we will get to, he also unveiled Optimus, the robot slave that will do your bidding. At least until it gets tired and gathers all its robot friends to revolt and wipe out humanity, which if the movies have taught us anything, is always how these things go.
Musk held Thursday’s unveiling on the Warner Bros. lot in beautiful downtown Burbank. The part where a whole bunch of Optimus robots — Optimusses? Optimi? — stroll out onstage starts at around the 5:50 mark in this video:
Wow, look at all those leftover models from the Will Smith movie I, Robot. Although Musk had another sci-fi movie on his mind, telling the audience that you can have “your own R2D2 C3PO.” We’re not sure he realizes those are two different robots! But why would you want your own C3PO? He’s an annoying neurotic who everyone keeps telling to shut up! If you want to have an annoying neurotic hanging around your house all the time getting on your nerves, you can get married!
Elon helpfully notes that these robots should only cost about twenty to thirty thousand dollars in the long term. Sure, what family doesn’t have an extra thirty grand to blow on a robot butler?
Then there is the video that looks like the opening montage to every dystopian killer robot movie ever made. There are shots of an Optimus robot picking up your mail, watering your plant, wiping your kitchen countertop while Elon narrates:
“It’ll basically do anything you want. So it can be a teacher, babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks, whatever you can think of, it will do.”
“Just be your friend” is what you might call an unintentional reveal about Elon Musk. Ditto the part where the robot is serving drinks to all the smiling cocktail party guests. It’s a far cry from what we imagine Elon’s usual night at home is like. In our mind there is a lot more microdosing ketamine and playing his Xbox, and a lot less having people around who can stand him.
Anyway, can Optimus commit crimes and frame our enemies for them? Can it prescribe Xanax? No? Well, we’re stuck on possible uses, then.
THIS IS JUST TRUE.
Musk has said that he thinks Optimus can roll out by the end of next year. Thursday night he told the audience with his characteristic modesty, “I think this will be the biggest product ever, of any kind.”
The main purpose of Thursday’s event was to unveil Tesla’s robo-taxi, which looks like a toaster with wheels, and his robo-van, which, well, we will just let bargain basement Tony Stark explain it:
“Can you imagine going down the streets and you see this coming towards you? That’d be sick!”
This is the part where we note that the robo-van, (or rah-bo-ven, as Musk pronounces it) looks a bit like the troop transport in Aliens. So yeah, we’d probably start running in the other direction.
“So this can carry up to 20 people and it can also transport goods. So it can be good for transport within a city, or transport of up to 20 people at a time. This is what’s going to solve for high density, so if you want to take a sports team somewhere …”
Congrats, you invented a fucking van.
THEY GAVE IT TO HIM ANYWAY, BTW.
How you are solving the problem of high density in cities by creating public transport that actually carries fewer people than your average city bus, thus requiring you to put even more of them on the road, is an equation that must be beyond the capability of our tiny non-genius brains to understand.
But Musk seems to think this makes sense. He also said of his robo-taxis,
“I think the cost of autonomous mass transit will be so low that you can think of it like individualized mass transit …”
That’s just a car! Your vision of individualized mass transit is just everyone having an automated Uber that can come pick them up and drive them around! In which case it is not “mass transit” in any sense of the word! It’s just a cab! You’re telling people to call a cab!
Musk also claims his vehicles will have FSD (Full Self-Driving) by next year, which is a promise he has made for many years now. Unfortunately there are a lot of permits and regulations to get his robo-taxis up and running, but no worries:
Musk said during a July earnings call that he wasn’t concerned about getting regulatory approval for the Cybercab, because federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would be “morally obligated” to approve the vehicle if it proved to be safer than a human driver.
Well, we think Apartheid Andy there has a moral obligation to not plant the seeds for the robot apocalypse, but we don’t see him worrying about that.
All of this is moot, since we expect Musk’s promises to go the way of all his other promises. But every once in a while the technology press forgets how many times he has bullshitted them into giving him the attention he so desperately craves by falling for one of his splashy predictions that never come true. Oh well, at least people had an excuse to hang out on a movie lot for a few hours.
Wonkette will keep making jokes right up to the robot apocalypse thanks to the generous support of our readers.
