AI, Current Affairs
Artificial Stupidity
I’ve spent the last couple of days like a football supporter who doesn’t want to hear the game result until he’s seen his recording of the game. On every news channel and popping up on everything from YouTube feeds to random adverts, the Elon Musk PR machine has been spewing out a story about robots or AI or something. But I wasn’t saving myself for the full gory of the press release, I was just hoping it would fizzle out before I was confronted with it.
Unfortunately, it caught up with me today – and it was even worse than I imagined.
No need to replay the presentation, I’m sure you’ve seen it; so here’s a transcript of the Tesla Board meeting that led to this.
Tesla board meeting August 2021
Present: Our Glorious and Most Brilliant Divine Master, Elon Musk (EM), Tom Tinker, Engineering (TT), Seamus O’Blather, Advertising (SOB)
SOB: People are starting to notice the top speed in the hype-o-loop is under 30 mph
EM: What can you do about that Tom?
TT: We can make the lights flash faster.
EM: Good job. And can we get more blue ones? Get the animators to do a whole “blue shifting, hype-o-loop now approaches speed of light” thing.
SOB: On it Divine Master. And the cars. They keep crashing when people use the auto feature.
EM: Didn’t we tell them that when we said “self drive”, we meant you have to drive them yourself?
SOB: We certainly did, we even told them that they’ll do the worst possible thing if you use the cruise control.
EM: Can you fix that Tom?
TT: Yes, we can use the same fix we used on the autonomous pods. Put a taxi driver in every car.
EM: Can’t we modify the airbag to look like a taxi driver?
SOB: Brilliant idea, Divine Master!
TT: We tried that before on the SN9. I think we need something more conventional.
EM: What about homeless people? They’re cheap and plentiful.
SOB: The busker who performs outside the office could probably drive all the cars. He even has his own uniform.
EM: Good work guys. Check the busker isn’t unionized then tell all the world’s press that I’ve invented the world’s first robot.
Meeting closes for prayers to the Great One, Elon Musk.
