Dangerous comment on HN, ta lot of people here see him as tony stark in the flesh. They really do love their heroes and usually don't let reality get in their way of worship
Even after thinking on it for a day I still cannot see how this comment of mine was in any way a personal attack or "Musk hate".
It wasn't a good comment as I didn't even try to make an argument, so the downvotes are definitely deserved but I cannot comprehend why it received a warning for said reasons. I'm neither attacking anyone personally nor do I say anything bad about Musk. I'm only pointing out that there are people around that literally worship him. That is not an opinion but a fact. Do you want me to link to content of that nature?
"a lot of people here see him as tony stark in the flesh" is a caricature, not a "fact", and clearly positions you on one side of the $celeb wars.
"They really do love their heroes", "don't let reality get in their way", and "worship" is all just name-calling designed to put down the other side—also not "fact", and definitely more $celeb war. Other than that, there was literally nothing in your comment.
if the other side is people worshiping a human man, then yes - I'm "name-calling" them to do exactly this.
I'm only acknowledging in my comment that there are participants to what you call a $celeb war, which see a pretty successful entrepreneur as something to be worshiped - which in my mind is always and in all situations an unhealthy view of any individual, no matter what they've set out to do or accomplished.
But this forum is obviously your community to do with as you please and it seems I've overstayed my welcome.
Overoptimistic perhaps. And sweeps audiences in his techno-optimism. I would not call him a con-man as such. He has expanded Tesla to a known brand with facilities around the globe and an orbital launch company.
Con-men do not create companies that push payload to orbit.
"A highly unreliable predictor of actual future features" would be a better characterization IMO.
Still can't be compared to Bezos, Gates, Brin&Page, Benioff, Ellison etc.
They are done. They founded the thing, grew it, nurtured it and now they left and the respective companies are still dominating.
Musk can't leave because his companies depend on him being there and pulling this sort of things.
People call him a con-man because he never really delivered anything financially sustainable before moving onto the next shiny thing.
It's not like he's media shy and needs to operate under the Tesla umbrella , like Page&Brin or Buffett need the Google/Berkshire umbrella respectively.
If you go by the fundamentals of the automotive market Tesla should be the American answer to Porsche or Ferrari, only totally electric. An honest 50B dollar car company.
All the extra is speculation (both technical and financial/marketcap-wise) and although speculating is fair game, it's not intellectually fair to list those things under Musk accomplishments , that is because they just aren't accomplished yet, they are POC at best and the judge is still out on whether they are even valid POC.
The paper wealth and the market cap can go as fast as it came for Tesla and Musk, and then all the people who are adoring him will start doubting and second guessing his decisons.
Nobody is second guessing Bill Gates deciding to go fully GUI with Windows 95, or Bezos opting to invest heavily in the cloud anymore. It's now clear as the sky that those were brilliant decisions.
True. But we also need to come up with a term to describe somebody who seeks personal monetary reward and social relevance before delivering actual and established corporate financial results.
Musk has been able to negotiate his hefty paycheck because investors are blinded by the huge increase in market cap and they see themselves getting richer by the day , which they are (on paper) but Musk takes home cold hard cash via salary.
All that before said increase in market cap is definitive and crystalised.
Such term doesn't exist, hence people adopt "con-man". Can't blame them as it's the closest word to describe such behavior...an other term would be "one-man-show"
What you said : "unreliable predictor of future outcomes" is very apt to describe Ray Kurzwell, but fails to include how Musk seeks monetary and social rewards which he pockets even if he gets it wrong. Ray never tried that.
That word "fraud" is an important one. It's the spectral signature of a hater to regard the object of their hatred as a fraud. They can't deny their fame. Indeed, their fame is if anything exaggerated in the hater's mind. They notice every mention of the singer's name, because every mention makes them angrier. In their own minds they exaggerate both the singer's fame and her lack of talent, and the only way to reconcile those two ideas is to conclude that she has tricked everyone.
What sort of people become haters? Can anyone become one? I'm not sure about this, but I've noticed some patterns. Haters are generally losers in a very specific sense: although they are occasionally talented, they have never achieved much. And indeed, anyone successful enough to have achieved significant fame would be unlikely to regard another famous person as a fraud on that account, because anyone famous knows how random fame is.
Sure. Except that frauds actually exist, not everyone accused of fraud is just a victim of envy.
Its quite telling that your quote is about a singer, where talent is quite subjective. In technology, things can be a bit more objective.
People who pointed out that it's physically impossible to make all the measurements from a single drop of blood Theranos claimed to make weren't haters, and people who point out the physical problems with Hyperloop and the Boring tunnels aren't "haters" either.
Also, it might be worth remembering that whatever else Musk is, he is also a fraudster. He intentionally lied, more than once, about the liquidity of Tesla, the product Tesla will deliver in the short term, and don't forget about the time where he told the public that Tesla was going public at $420 per share.
Please don't post dumb dismissals like this, which are the mirror image of the thing they're arguing with. It's against the site guidelines and oh-so-tedious.
Edit: would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments generally? You've unfortunately done a lot of that and we ban that sort of account. We're trying for more thoughtful conversation here (which is also why $Celebrity wars are off topic.)
The part that made me guffaw the most was him saying it would respond to voice commands like a human and he already knows how since the Tesla cars are basically “sentient robots on wheels”. The Tesla voice control makes Siri look like Albert Einstein. I completely gave up on it. I don’t know what Rosetta Stone it requires to use but I wasn’t provided with it upon purchase. The best quote I found about the Tesla voice control is from Reddit-
“It's almost like the dev who worked on the feature left, and nobody has taken over that duty yet.”
Sending astronauts to Mars surface and bringing them home is energetically horrific. It's not so much the getting to Mars orbit bit that's hard work (at least, from Earth orbit), as descending into a gravity well and then getting back out of it again.
But current Mars robots have a huge control lag due to speed of light delays (up to 30 minutes between Earth/Mars, depending on where both planets are). It'd be easier to explore the surface using robots if they were controlled by astronauts in orbit -- say, in a small space station dug into the surface of Phobos or Deimos for radiation shielding.
And the easiest robots for a human to control directly using a conceivable circa-2030s AR rig are either a car-like machine or a human-body-shaped machine.
You could trial such a device on the Moon (as part of the Starship HLS plans NASA is currently backing for the Artemis Program), as an adjunct to actual astronauts on EVA (which is always a risky task). And the software for a human-controlled humanoid robot would be vastly easier to develop than the sort of fully autonomous control system Boston Dynamics is aiming for, hence (I suspect) Musk's over-optimistic projection.
TLDR: I think Musk is trolling Boston Dynamics et al, and his real goal is something a lot more practical. (Either that or he's been hitting the magic mushrooms again.)
Deploying robots on the moon would be extremely useful even if they have minimal autonomy and have to be remote controlled from Earth.
All current efforts are rovers with scientific instruments, nobody has yet attempted to build something capable of clearing rocks for a launch pad let alone mounting solar panels.
This needs to move on from research projects into actual series production.
Just for reference, you’re extrapolating all the way to things like digging holes in moons of other planets from a starting point of a guy dancing around a stage in a white spandex outfit.
However, I think digging holes for radiation shielding in a smallish asteroid-like body -- especially if it's a gravel pile similar to 101955 Bennu -- may prove easier than landing, provisioning, and returning human beings from the Martian surface.
(101955 Bennu, target of the OSIRIS-REx probe, turned out to be a rubble pile. It's an order of magnitude smaller than the Martian moons, which are nevertheless also believed to be rubble piles -- they're not large enough to have significant surface gravity, let alone enough to melt/fuse their rocks.)
But a humanoid is a pretty useless form factor for that kind of work. Humanoid robots are good in the kind of environments where humans evolved, or that they built for themselves.
Astronauts in Mars orbit need radiation shielding. So: dig their spacecraft/habitat into one of the Moons.
Humanoid robots: put them on Mars, instead of landing astronauts. That way, you don't need to bring them home afterwards. Meanwhile, with a good AR/VR rig, the astronauts (dug into the Phobos base) can control them remotely with no lag.
I'm now picturing "humanoid" only in the loosest sense, e.g. a head and arms only, for remote operation by a human inside the Mars (or Phobos) base, mounted on the outside of a cybertruck, like some Terminator Centaur.
The operator would be able to toggle between "drive the truck" and "pick up rocks" modes, depending on which shape is appropriate for the task at hand.
But that is not what was announced, and very little of the hard problems involved in building an actual humanoid robot like the one Musk announced are relevant to building what you suggest.
1) Declare a ludicrous "pie in the sky" / "City on Mars" goal.
2) Use that to inspire, hire clever but starry eyed people who will work 7 days a week in service of that.
3) Iterate rapidly on do-able things in the general direction of the goal.
4) Reach some some point that's far from the original goal, but is still a huge achievement (e.g. re-usable rockets to LEO).
5) Profit!
6) Use the profits to start again, with another field that has synergy to the last (e.g. if you have electric cars, then add solar panels and battery packs)
In terms of humanoid robots this makes sense, the "10% to the goal" point is useful, and ties into the space plan. Robotics and space have synergies.
Note: original post calls the big goal "relatable, unoriginal" - this is a feature not a bug: to inspire, pick something that people already understand. Something that you don't have to explain.
While Musk lost some credibility over cryptocurrency related topics, it is important that he manages to repackage these already "thought of" stuff in an almost Steve Jobs sort of fashion and insert into the public consciousness. Apart from the hiring, many companies start up just to get acquired by Tesla, or to compete with them. Which creates the much needed innovation by itself.
I think he uses his media power for a good purpose even if he himself or his company cannot reach such goals, he creates the stepping stones in a future that I really like to see happen.
Yes I thought something similar. Basically, whenever Musk announces anything, I ask myself “how does this relate to Mars?”
Mostly it’s pretty obvious. Tunnel boring machines to dig hyperloop tunnels to take passengers from the starship spaceport to the nearest city on Mars? Check. (Why isn’t he building hyperloops himself? No need to create a vacuum on Mars… but the vehicle research will be interesting)
Tunnels are one of the most important things you could build on any planet or satellite like the moon.
Remember there is no atmosphere nor magnetic fields on other planets to protect you from cosmic rays, so a good solution is make people live underground.
Some time ago a teacher offered me to make my Master thesis on that(I did not take it) because there were people already working on this problem.
BTW, places like the moon are very interesting. Because there is no fluid erosion every single grain of sand is extremely abrasive.
> But humanoid robots are much different, and much more complicated. With rockets, well, we already had rockets. And with electric cars, we already had cars, batteries, sensors, and the DARPA competitions to build on.
I don't think this line of argumentation holds up very well: we already have decades of research on humanoid robots too. They're just not good enough to be economically viable but they same could be said of electric cars and reusable rockets.
Why couldn't Tesla just hire enough people to replicate the published research and then improve it? The total amount of money invested in robotics worldwide is probably not even that high. The capital required to duplicate Boston Dynamics doing parkour is probably much less that what Tesla is already investing in custom AI hardware.
But the question is, why build a humanoid robot? It's much harder to balance (especially if it should be extendable with modules), probably won't be able to handle harsher terrain than four-legged models in the foreseeable future, and I don't see how they can do tasks significantly better than a simpler model with a few robot arms.
The stature isn't the main reason for the versatility of humans. I guess humanoid robots would be useful in situations where familiarity is important, but Tesla probably wants more than just a premium customer greeter with integrated voice assistant.
Our indoor environments are built for humans. For instance, robots with wheels would struggle with stairs. Short robots would have trouble reaching up and grabbing things from shelves. Wide robots would struggle to get down narrow hallways.
The four-legged Boston Dynamics robot can walk up/down stairs, is pretty slim and has a robot arm able to reach a bit higher. And there's still a lot of room for improvement.
Even humans can't always reach the highest shelves without a ladder. I'd like to see a humanoid robot successfully climb one up and down while holding an object; that alone would be an insane achievement.
A good humanoid robot costs a ton, to a point where I doubt it'll see much use in normal households. I'd love to be wrong in that aspect, but I haven't yet seen an affordable robot beyond hobby project standards. Imho a humanoid body would be a nice bonus once everything else is working reliably and there's enough demand, not what I'd start out with.
Fair points. However, I think the biggest problem with a short robot would be people tripping over it. Even if it had a big 'ol arm sticking out like a robotic giraffe, it'd be hard to gauge the dimensions of the base, especially given it may not be clear what direction it is facing if the arm can reticulate about as it pleases.
So, a robot in a human environment must be about human height and width, but also its width should be roughly uniform from top to bottom like a human.
I suppose you could build a quadruped of those dimensions, but it's hard to imagine what it'd look like. I am not aware of any creatures like that occurring in nature, likely with good reason.
> However, I think the biggest problem with a short robot would be people tripping over it.
Somehow that has not turned out to be a major problem with the closest thing we already have in widespread "use": Dogs.
I think we can agree that humans are pretty good at not stepping on a retriever-sized thing by accident. Not to mention that these robots will probably not be very quiet (servos can be pretty noisy). So if that's the biggest problem, we'd be in pretty good shape.
A self-driving car is just an intrinsically easier problem to solve. In fact, the first car that automatically centred a car within a lane using cameras to track lane markings hit the road in 1977! They had cars doing cross-country trips on highways with traffic in the 1990s!
Obviously there are complexities to it, which is why don't have any level 4 vehicles is just so much lower.
Humanoid robots are just several magnitudes harder because you first have to master the basic mechanics of human-like movement before you can move onto higher order things like avoiding running into a person. With a bipedal robot, a simple operation like walking up a hill is a major achievement. In the car domain, you essentially get that stuff for free.
Humanoid robots might be hard but they've been successfully demonstrated. It might also be argued that machine learning can make complex motions easier than if everything is hand-coded.
The humanoid form factor might be an entirely unnecessary distraction, a robot with more legs or non-human articulations would be just as useful.
Boston dynamics has found machine learning to be minimally useful here, and has had better results hand-coding most things. That’s not to say that is necessarily correct for all scenarios, but BD has lots of extremely smart and motivated people and I would take their results seriously - so at very least it doesn’t seem to be as easy as throwing a big neural net at it, and any machine learning approach will require hard and careful work.
Re: successfully demonstrated, again Boston Dynamics might be the best example. Their bipeds are nowhere near the functionality levels Elon is describing - fine motor skills, vision, even walking (it’s my understanding that Boston Dynamics has to individually tune their bipeds for every course) are years and years away from hitting Elon’s goals at current rate of progress.
Furthermore, the BD bipeds have a battery life of about ten minutes. You need a revolution in either energy storage density or kinematic efficiency or more likely both to get a useful assistant bot out of it.
I hadn’t even thought of the physics constraints on the energy needed. This is a truly ridiculous goalpost he has set unless he has developed the arc reactor to put in its chest.
"Humanoid robots might be hard but they've been successfully demonstrated."
None of these robots can hang our laundry to dry, de-bone a chicken or cook a meal. They cannot perform any of the thousands of tasks we perform every day that require dexterity. They have just about mastered locomotion, and that's it.
If I remember correctly Elon Musk actually said "We had no idea what we were doing" while talking about development of the first Dragon cargo capsule, so I guess he would be the first to admit that. That doesn't mean that they are not even going to try. You see that happening over at SpaceX with Starship development right now: start by trying a best guess ("Starhopper" was like a water tower with massive legs and an engine) and then build, test, improve, fail occassionally,...
The author uses naivety, but this statement is very questionable to anyone interested in spaceflight. No, "we" didn't have any vertically landing reusable rocket capable of autonomous reentry, except one primitive atmospheric demo vehicle with manual primary controls. Let alone engines such as Raptors in the western world.
Anyhow, the presentation itself didn't seem to take itself very seriously, so I wouldn't think too much about the (very difficult) feasibleness of this, they must be aware. Hell, it may just be an elaborate advertisement for jobs.
I like Elon Musk even though I have no expectation that this will work. I like that he is willing to try. Most billionaires in the world are incredibly boring. They just keep doing what they've been doing trying to earn more money. Elon Musk is a style of billionaire that other billionaires should aspire to - "I guess we'll try to make humanoid robots now."
Maybe if they could get it to a reasonable price point and get it to follow someone they could sell some of these as novelty type thing.
We're still waiting for Automatic Self Drive, not long ago he acknowledged it's harder than he thought it would be. Musk is a good marketeer though, he knows how to make headlines. A Tesla Bot will also likely be harder than he expected.
Hyperloop didn't work out and the remaining related projects are looking more and more like scams. In the last few years no noteworthy progress has been made and even the most basic questions haven't ever been answered.
The Boring Company, which ripped off the original The Boring Company, has one finished project which didn't get close to the original vision and cost enough that further projects were put on hold.
Neuralink is cool but Musk made some really wild claims in their name without much to back them up.
SpaceX and Tesla do some amazing stuff and hopefully they keep being successful. But that doesn't say anything about the rest.
Many of those side bets that "don't work yet" are much newer than Tesla and SpaceX and have had much less effort put into them. Claims that "they will never work" are predicting the future based mostly on personal biases.
For example Hyperloop is just a concept that other people are trying to implement with very limited resources.
"Claims that "they will never work" are predicting the future based mostly on personal biases."
No, there are transport and contruction proffeshionals explaining that economics of the Hyperloop cannot work, it requires more effort to build and has 100x less capacity and worse safety than any bullet train.
The Boring Company doesn't even make sence, how are they making tonnels cheaper? Have they achieved anything at all? There is no 'core of innovation' behind it
> For example Hyperloop is just a concept that other people are trying to implement with very limited resources.
Virgin Hyperloop raised $160 million from investors and all they can show after 7 years is a successful trip through the massively downscaled 500m test track, at a fraction of the advertised speed.
So far nobody could show that it can compete with standard high-speed trains, how those by far largest vaccum chambers are supposed to be maintained and protected, or how the metal tube's massive temperature-dependent expansions are going to be handled. Those are huge engineering challenges and all they seemed to focus on so far are some public partnerships and interior designs.
This is a project they haven't done anything about yet, from the presentation it looks like they just came up with the idea that they would work on this within a week before.
Musk's fans give him too much credit for announcing future work.
Well, you gotta start somewhere. I'm getting tired of people dismissing any effort of changing the world.
These are the same people that were laughing at him when he launched tesla. The same people whole said Apple was doomed, because they only had a smartphone. Etc. etc. etc.
And some were laughing as he announced full autonomous driving next year ... five years ago.
Or lets talk about his Mars settlement.
There a things that are realistic but people thought it's too expensive or too niche and there are things that sound like straight out of science fiction.
Musk is good in the former and not so good in the latter.
"I'm getting tired of people dismissing any effort of changing the world."
I am getting tired of people praising Elon joke projects as world-changing.
Its a voice assistant, we already have them, there is nothong world changing. Also Hyperloop is and Boring company are pretty useless, and are likely to stay that way - passenger capacity of every hyperloop design and of the tonnela are pethetic compared to a normal train
I think it's just lazy to dismiss everyone's criticism as one thing. Sure, there are idiots out on the internet who are going to crap all over what anyone does for literally any reason. However, the people are criticising are actual people and they do actually have arguments that you should think about. Some of those arguments are bad, but a lot of them aren't. When Elon Musk decided he was going to revolutionize travel with the Boring company a load of experts in town planning and infrastructure came out and said - "Hey, we're experts, we understand this problem, you aren't even solving the right problem" and so far, they seem basically correct. The boring company could completely succeed at its goal, and it wouldn't matter.
There are going to be lightweight criticisms of this concept (Musk invites those by making someone dress up in a morph suit and dance like a robot). But there are also going to be more realistic criticisms such as the fact that whilst Humanoid robots have remained science fiction, non-humanoid robots have proliferated massively across industries that were previously fully manual. It'd be great if we could build a humanoid robot to replace all those humans trudging around Amazon fulfillment centres- but we don't need to, because those robots have no reason to be humanoid in the first place.
I'm tired of people pretending that just the aspiration to change the world excuses you from real criticism of your ideas. There are plenty of people out there changing the world- some of them mentioned in the article, and those people actually thought out what they were doing before getting a guy in a morph suit to dance in front of the worlds press. Let's not forget, we're still waiting for the autonomous driving promises Musk has failed to deliver on for years now.
> "Hey, we're experts, we understand this problem, you aren't even solving the right problem" and so far, they seem basically correct. The boring company could completely succeed at its goal, and it wouldn't matter.
A lot of experts in cars and rockets claimed that Tesla and SpaceX are terrible ideas and they were proved wrong many times. Incumbents are too often dismissive of new ideas.
Many of the arguments against the boring company are "social arguments" from people who are ideologically committed to bikes and public transport. They have very little to do with whether it is possible to build cheaper tunnels.
I think you're missing the point - which was to engage on the actual criticism and not just hand wave about "Oh lots of people said stuff". Sure, in any given case you can find someone making a bad argument on the internet, it doesn't mean there aren't good arguments, and in many cases if you listen to the good arguments, you realise what Musk is taking years to realise.
I think Elon Musk is exploring new stuff to do at Tesla to keep talented AI people in the company and not make them go away and search for new exciting problems to solve.
Even if the robot will never be real, he can keep these people excited and maybe gather new talent
Also it's kind of an interesting project that can probably be worked on at fairly low cost given it uses the car hardware. I get the impression it's more a case of let's see if we can hack this stuff into a bot rather than a commercial plan.
What will the Bot be used for? I can see why it'll be useful in the future when we have AGI. But until then, I don't see what advantage it'll have over things built specifically for a particular job, which is already hard enough to achieve.
You'd be surprised how much "deal with unpredicted stuff" construction work entails.
Indeed, robots already can hammer nails into walls. Or dig holes. But we still pay construction workers to do these things (well, usually operating tools/machines - but we decidedly don't let those devices operate themselves). And it turns out that the results of them following orders too literally (like a robot would) tends to lead to funny (or tragic) videos clips.
See also this recent HN article, which discusses (the failures of) automating a much more restricted task in a seemingly straightforward domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28054606
I wouldn't be surprised if they get to the point of go get me an X from the fridge in a year but really the tipping point of usefulness will be go make me some properly seasoned scrambled eggs. Very few jobs are constrained to just go get x or help move Y so they will run into same problem as other current robot companies finding a customer. Spot is quite capable yet amazon hasn't replaced its pickers with it so what is the key feature musk needs to implement?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17709543 (Aug 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17512473 (July 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17502225 (July 2018)
It wasn't a good comment as I didn't even try to make an argument, so the downvotes are definitely deserved but I cannot comprehend why it received a warning for said reasons. I'm neither attacking anyone personally nor do I say anything bad about Musk. I'm only pointing out that there are people around that literally worship him. That is not an opinion but a fact. Do you want me to link to content of that nature?
"They really do love their heroes", "don't let reality get in their way", and "worship" is all just name-calling designed to put down the other side—also not "fact", and definitely more $celeb war. Other than that, there was literally nothing in your comment.
I'm only acknowledging in my comment that there are participants to what you call a $celeb war, which see a pretty successful entrepreneur as something to be worshiped - which in my mind is always and in all situations an unhealthy view of any individual, no matter what they've set out to do or accomplished.
But this forum is obviously your community to do with as you please and it seems I've overstayed my welcome.
Con-men do not create companies that push payload to orbit.
"A highly unreliable predictor of actual future features" would be a better characterization IMO.
They are done. They founded the thing, grew it, nurtured it and now they left and the respective companies are still dominating.
Musk can't leave because his companies depend on him being there and pulling this sort of things.
People call him a con-man because he never really delivered anything financially sustainable before moving onto the next shiny thing.
It's not like he's media shy and needs to operate under the Tesla umbrella , like Page&Brin or Buffett need the Google/Berkshire umbrella respectively.
If you go by the fundamentals of the automotive market Tesla should be the American answer to Porsche or Ferrari, only totally electric. An honest 50B dollar car company.
All the extra is speculation (both technical and financial/marketcap-wise) and although speculating is fair game, it's not intellectually fair to list those things under Musk accomplishments , that is because they just aren't accomplished yet, they are POC at best and the judge is still out on whether they are even valid POC.
The paper wealth and the market cap can go as fast as it came for Tesla and Musk, and then all the people who are adoring him will start doubting and second guessing his decisons.
Nobody is second guessing Bill Gates deciding to go fully GUI with Windows 95, or Bezos opting to invest heavily in the cloud anymore. It's now clear as the sky that those were brilliant decisions.
The fact that they're still investing in future products doesn't seem like much of a criticism.
True. But we also need to come up with a term to describe somebody who seeks personal monetary reward and social relevance before delivering actual and established corporate financial results.
Musk has been able to negotiate his hefty paycheck because investors are blinded by the huge increase in market cap and they see themselves getting richer by the day , which they are (on paper) but Musk takes home cold hard cash via salary.
All that before said increase in market cap is definitive and crystalised.
Such term doesn't exist, hence people adopt "con-man". Can't blame them as it's the closest word to describe such behavior...an other term would be "one-man-show"
What you said : "unreliable predictor of future outcomes" is very apt to describe Ray Kurzwell, but fails to include how Musk seeks monetary and social rewards which he pockets even if he gets it wrong. Ray never tried that.
That word "fraud" is an important one. It's the spectral signature of a hater to regard the object of their hatred as a fraud. They can't deny their fame. Indeed, their fame is if anything exaggerated in the hater's mind. They notice every mention of the singer's name, because every mention makes them angrier. In their own minds they exaggerate both the singer's fame and her lack of talent, and the only way to reconcile those two ideas is to conclude that she has tricked everyone.
What sort of people become haters? Can anyone become one? I'm not sure about this, but I've noticed some patterns. Haters are generally losers in a very specific sense: although they are occasionally talented, they have never achieved much. And indeed, anyone successful enough to have achieved significant fame would be unlikely to regard another famous person as a fraud on that account, because anyone famous knows how random fame is.
Its quite telling that your quote is about a singer, where talent is quite subjective. In technology, things can be a bit more objective.
People who pointed out that it's physically impossible to make all the measurements from a single drop of blood Theranos claimed to make weren't haters, and people who point out the physical problems with Hyperloop and the Boring tunnels aren't "haters" either.
Also, it might be worth remembering that whatever else Musk is, he is also a fraudster. He intentionally lied, more than once, about the liquidity of Tesla, the product Tesla will deliver in the short term, and don't forget about the time where he told the public that Tesla was going public at $420 per share.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26528522 (March 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17709543 (Aug 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17512473 (July 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17502225 (July 2018)
Edit: would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments generally? You've unfortunately done a lot of that and we ban that sort of account. We're trying for more thoughtful conversation here (which is also why $Celebrity wars are off topic.)
https://japantoday.com/category/tech/japanese-convenience-st...
“It's almost like the dev who worked on the feature left, and nobody has taken over that duty yet.”
That was two years ago.
So Tesla could easily have used similar tech given the cars are always connected.
Sending astronauts to Mars surface and bringing them home is energetically horrific. It's not so much the getting to Mars orbit bit that's hard work (at least, from Earth orbit), as descending into a gravity well and then getting back out of it again.
But current Mars robots have a huge control lag due to speed of light delays (up to 30 minutes between Earth/Mars, depending on where both planets are). It'd be easier to explore the surface using robots if they were controlled by astronauts in orbit -- say, in a small space station dug into the surface of Phobos or Deimos for radiation shielding.
And the easiest robots for a human to control directly using a conceivable circa-2030s AR rig are either a car-like machine or a human-body-shaped machine.
You could trial such a device on the Moon (as part of the Starship HLS plans NASA is currently backing for the Artemis Program), as an adjunct to actual astronauts on EVA (which is always a risky task). And the software for a human-controlled humanoid robot would be vastly easier to develop than the sort of fully autonomous control system Boston Dynamics is aiming for, hence (I suspect) Musk's over-optimistic projection.
TLDR: I think Musk is trolling Boston Dynamics et al, and his real goal is something a lot more practical. (Either that or he's been hitting the magic mushrooms again.)
All current efforts are rovers with scientific instruments, nobody has yet attempted to build something capable of clearing rocks for a launch pad let alone mounting solar panels.
This needs to move on from research projects into actual series production.
Especially with the 2.6 second lightspeed delay in any remote control inputs.
However, I think digging holes for radiation shielding in a smallish asteroid-like body -- especially if it's a gravel pile similar to 101955 Bennu -- may prove easier than landing, provisioning, and returning human beings from the Martian surface.
(101955 Bennu, target of the OSIRIS-REx probe, turned out to be a rubble pile. It's an order of magnitude smaller than the Martian moons, which are nevertheless also believed to be rubble piles -- they're not large enough to have significant surface gravity, let alone enough to melt/fuse their rocks.)
Asteroid mining is pretty far from that.
Astronauts in Mars orbit need radiation shielding. So: dig their spacecraft/habitat into one of the Moons.
Humanoid robots: put them on Mars, instead of landing astronauts. That way, you don't need to bring them home afterwards. Meanwhile, with a good AR/VR rig, the astronauts (dug into the Phobos base) can control them remotely with no lag.
The operator would be able to toggle between "drive the truck" and "pick up rocks" modes, depending on which shape is appropriate for the task at hand.
yes, so what? We expect that.
Previous comment here touches upon the connection and inevitable gap between the inspirational BS "what was announced" and final outcomes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28255768
It is easier than dancing and genuinely viable as a product, with that viability increasing with the degree of autonomy.
(edit: here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28243811 )
IIRC it went some thing like:
1) Declare a ludicrous "pie in the sky" / "City on Mars" goal.
2) Use that to inspire, hire clever but starry eyed people who will work 7 days a week in service of that.
3) Iterate rapidly on do-able things in the general direction of the goal.
4) Reach some some point that's far from the original goal, but is still a huge achievement (e.g. re-usable rockets to LEO).
5) Profit!
6) Use the profits to start again, with another field that has synergy to the last (e.g. if you have electric cars, then add solar panels and battery packs)
In terms of humanoid robots this makes sense, the "10% to the goal" point is useful, and ties into the space plan. Robotics and space have synergies.
Note: original post calls the big goal "relatable, unoriginal" - this is a feature not a bug: to inspire, pick something that people already understand. Something that you don't have to explain.
I think he uses his media power for a good purpose even if he himself or his company cannot reach such goals, he creates the stepping stones in a future that I really like to see happen.
Mostly it’s pretty obvious. Tunnel boring machines to dig hyperloop tunnels to take passengers from the starship spaceport to the nearest city on Mars? Check. (Why isn’t he building hyperloops himself? No need to create a vacuum on Mars… but the vehicle research will be interesting)
Remember there is no atmosphere nor magnetic fields on other planets to protect you from cosmic rays, so a good solution is make people live underground.
Some time ago a teacher offered me to make my Master thesis on that(I did not take it) because there were people already working on this problem.
BTW, places like the moon are very interesting. Because there is no fluid erosion every single grain of sand is extremely abrasive.
I don't think this line of argumentation holds up very well: we already have decades of research on humanoid robots too. They're just not good enough to be economically viable but they same could be said of electric cars and reusable rockets.
Why couldn't Tesla just hire enough people to replicate the published research and then improve it? The total amount of money invested in robotics worldwide is probably not even that high. The capital required to duplicate Boston Dynamics doing parkour is probably much less that what Tesla is already investing in custom AI hardware.
The stature isn't the main reason for the versatility of humans. I guess humanoid robots would be useful in situations where familiarity is important, but Tesla probably wants more than just a premium customer greeter with integrated voice assistant.
Even humans can't always reach the highest shelves without a ladder. I'd like to see a humanoid robot successfully climb one up and down while holding an object; that alone would be an insane achievement.
A good humanoid robot costs a ton, to a point where I doubt it'll see much use in normal households. I'd love to be wrong in that aspect, but I haven't yet seen an affordable robot beyond hobby project standards. Imho a humanoid body would be a nice bonus once everything else is working reliably and there's enough demand, not what I'd start out with.
So, a robot in a human environment must be about human height and width, but also its width should be roughly uniform from top to bottom like a human.
I suppose you could build a quadruped of those dimensions, but it's hard to imagine what it'd look like. I am not aware of any creatures like that occurring in nature, likely with good reason.
Somehow that has not turned out to be a major problem with the closest thing we already have in widespread "use": Dogs.
I think we can agree that humans are pretty good at not stepping on a retriever-sized thing by accident. Not to mention that these robots will probably not be very quiet (servos can be pretty noisy). So if that's the biggest problem, we'd be in pretty good shape.
Just ask the Daleks.
For one, humanoid robots are a bit less creepy than the alternatives. Have you seen the BD robots?
That’s not as important for industrial use, though.
Obviously there are complexities to it, which is why don't have any level 4 vehicles is just so much lower.
Humanoid robots are just several magnitudes harder because you first have to master the basic mechanics of human-like movement before you can move onto higher order things like avoiding running into a person. With a bipedal robot, a simple operation like walking up a hill is a major achievement. In the car domain, you essentially get that stuff for free.
The humanoid form factor might be an entirely unnecessary distraction, a robot with more legs or non-human articulations would be just as useful.
Re: successfully demonstrated, again Boston Dynamics might be the best example. Their bipeds are nowhere near the functionality levels Elon is describing - fine motor skills, vision, even walking (it’s my understanding that Boston Dynamics has to individually tune their bipeds for every course) are years and years away from hitting Elon’s goals at current rate of progress.
Furthermore, the BD bipeds have a battery life of about ten minutes. You need a revolution in either energy storage density or kinematic efficiency or more likely both to get a useful assistant bot out of it.
None of these robots can hang our laundry to dry, de-bone a chicken or cook a meal. They cannot perform any of the thousands of tasks we perform every day that require dexterity. They have just about mastered locomotion, and that's it.
But we know with 100% certainty we'll never find out unless we try.
The author uses naivety, but this statement is very questionable to anyone interested in spaceflight. No, "we" didn't have any vertically landing reusable rocket capable of autonomous reentry, except one primitive atmospheric demo vehicle with manual primary controls. Let alone engines such as Raptors in the western world.
Anyhow, the presentation itself didn't seem to take itself very seriously, so I wouldn't think too much about the (very difficult) feasibleness of this, they must be aware. Hell, it may just be an elaborate advertisement for jobs.
Maybe if they could get it to a reasonable price point and get it to follow someone they could sell some of these as novelty type thing.
Hyperloop didn't work out and the remaining related projects are looking more and more like scams. In the last few years no noteworthy progress has been made and even the most basic questions haven't ever been answered.
The Boring Company, which ripped off the original The Boring Company, has one finished project which didn't get close to the original vision and cost enough that further projects were put on hold.
Neuralink is cool but Musk made some really wild claims in their name without much to back them up.
SpaceX and Tesla do some amazing stuff and hopefully they keep being successful. But that doesn't say anything about the rest.
For example Hyperloop is just a concept that other people are trying to implement with very limited resources.
No, there are transport and contruction proffeshionals explaining that economics of the Hyperloop cannot work, it requires more effort to build and has 100x less capacity and worse safety than any bullet train.
The Boring Company doesn't even make sence, how are they making tonnels cheaper? Have they achieved anything at all? There is no 'core of innovation' behind it
Virgin Hyperloop raised $160 million from investors and all they can show after 7 years is a successful trip through the massively downscaled 500m test track, at a fraction of the advertised speed.
So far nobody could show that it can compete with standard high-speed trains, how those by far largest vaccum chambers are supposed to be maintained and protected, or how the metal tube's massive temperature-dependent expansions are going to be handled. Those are huge engineering challenges and all they seemed to focus on so far are some public partnerships and interior designs.
Musk was wise to get off that train.
Musk's fans give him too much credit for announcing future work.
"look I spent $50k on this android - it makes fart noises and tries to jump off the pavement into a bush every few days"
These are the same people that were laughing at him when he launched tesla. The same people whole said Apple was doomed, because they only had a smartphone. Etc. etc. etc.
Musk is good in the former and not so good in the latter.
You are making the exact same dismissive mistake Elon is making: Just ignoring the existing work, or assuming it is somehow just shoddy.
I am getting tired of people praising Elon joke projects as world-changing.
Its a voice assistant, we already have them, there is nothong world changing. Also Hyperloop is and Boring company are pretty useless, and are likely to stay that way - passenger capacity of every hyperloop design and of the tonnela are pethetic compared to a normal train
There are going to be lightweight criticisms of this concept (Musk invites those by making someone dress up in a morph suit and dance like a robot). But there are also going to be more realistic criticisms such as the fact that whilst Humanoid robots have remained science fiction, non-humanoid robots have proliferated massively across industries that were previously fully manual. It'd be great if we could build a humanoid robot to replace all those humans trudging around Amazon fulfillment centres- but we don't need to, because those robots have no reason to be humanoid in the first place.
I'm tired of people pretending that just the aspiration to change the world excuses you from real criticism of your ideas. There are plenty of people out there changing the world- some of them mentioned in the article, and those people actually thought out what they were doing before getting a guy in a morph suit to dance in front of the worlds press. Let's not forget, we're still waiting for the autonomous driving promises Musk has failed to deliver on for years now.
A lot of experts in cars and rockets claimed that Tesla and SpaceX are terrible ideas and they were proved wrong many times. Incumbents are too often dismissive of new ideas.
Many of the arguments against the boring company are "social arguments" from people who are ideologically committed to bikes and public transport. They have very little to do with whether it is possible to build cheaper tunnels.
Can we see some references to these experts?
Even if the robot will never be real, he can keep these people excited and maybe gather new talent
Indeed, robots already can hammer nails into walls. Or dig holes. But we still pay construction workers to do these things (well, usually operating tools/machines - but we decidedly don't let those devices operate themselves). And it turns out that the results of them following orders too literally (like a robot would) tends to lead to funny (or tragic) videos clips.
See also this recent HN article, which discusses (the failures of) automating a much more restricted task in a seemingly straightforward domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28054606
That is, if it shares the AI stack with Tesla AP.