It’s crazy that, after all his lies about pie-in-the-sky projects, the financial press is still mostly credulous about all things Elon Musk.
This time it’s the Wall Street Journal running an article about Musk’s big two-legged anthropomorphic robot event that everyone who knows anything about robots laughingly said was a sham. There was this paragraph slipped into the larger article:
Mr. Musk, who has been instrumental in popularizing electric vehicles and pioneered landing rocket boosters with his company SpaceX, also has a record of making bold predictions that don’t immediately pan out. Three years ago at an event about automation, he projected that more than a million Tesla vehicles would be able to operate without a driver by the middle of 2020, positioning the company to launch a robot taxi service. That hasn’t happened.
That “don’t immediately pan out” LOLOL.
You mean like his ridiculous tunnel in Las Vegas?
Or his unbreakable truck glass?
Or any number of other lies he’s Tweeted to manipulate his stock price?
Robotics experts mostly panned his Sept. 30 robot event, with many of them saying that a two-legged humanistic robot makes no sense from the standpoints of design and usability.
One of the big questions around Tesla’s humanoid robot is its central purpose, said Chris Atkeson, a Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor. If Tesla’s main goal is to improve manufacturing, a quadruped likely would have been easier to build than a humanoid robot, in part because additional legs make it easier to balance, he said.
So this is all likely another sham meant to prop up stock prices until everyone figures out Musk is selling snake oil again.
