Elon the Entertainer
Elon Musk is likely the greatest entrepreneur of all time.
As a philosopher, like many of his colleagues in the world of apocalyptic artificial intelligence (AI), he is increasingly delusional. His latest delusion is that Optimus, his humanoid robot, possibly combined with Neuralink and its “Telepathy” human interface, is about to become “the world’s leading product.”
Musk declares that Optimus soon will provide some 80% of Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) revenues as the company soars to a $25 trillion market cap. He explains, “There will be more digital intelligence than all human intelligence combined, and more humanoid robots than all humans.”
The robots, says Musk, will perform almost all human jobs and make all physical products. They’re the best! They’re Optimal.
But why should the existing manufacturing model, with robotic transhuman functions increasingly specialized for every purpose, give way to some suboptimal humanoid omnifab? Human workers become more valuable precisely as they acquire more specialized skills. Why would general purpose manufacturing with robots linked to datacenters consuming gigawatts displace human brains using tens of watts?
Machines typically gain in function to the extent they do not resemble us. We utterly lack wheels and wings. Where are our mountain-moving caterpillar tracks? Where are our surgeons’ x-ray eyes for finding tumors or on-board gamma rays for killing them?
How would we be better served by gawky plastic mobiles resembling us?
Musk’s chief intellectual flaw is his anthropomorphic religiosity. All these AI prophets imagine they are Gods populating a new Elon Garden with improved species and tempting us with luminous apples. It’s the “materialist superstition,” a “pomme de terre.” It’s infested with serpentine egos and Apple Pan Dowdy, devoid of any notion of the still baffling mindscape of consciousness and transcendence.
Science today still lacks any plausible theory of human psychic powers, any real grasp of the transcendent mysteries of mind. A high point of my COSM conference last November in Scottsdale, Arizona, was neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s case for an immaterial soul and human consciousness. Offering his own empirical testimony from thousands of surgeries, he dismantled the brilliant professional sceptic Michael Shermer’s once “sophisticated,” now sophistic materialism.
On materialism, my Discovery Institute and its fabulous fellows such as Jim Tour, of Rice University, have won. Tour celebrated his victory last week with a scintillating hour and a half on the Tucker Carlson Show, which seemed to be attempting an escape from the disgrace of his stupid critiques of Israel by celebrating Tour with some 20 Israeli companies.
On materialism, Musk is a gasbag. But should we sell his stock? Compared to his predecessor Henry Ford, who was an actual anti-Semite and inspiration for Adolf Hitler, Musk is a deep and affirmative thinker.
Optimus may turn out to be entirely suboptimal. But Tesla remains a visionary and transformative company. It may even be a buy with its stock modestly dipping in recent weeks and again in reaction to grand claims from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
CES opened Tuesday, Jan. 6, in Vegas with a superb presentation by Huang, his black leather jacket enhanced with renewed glitter, on Nvidia’s achievements in full-service driving (FSD). Yet Huang’s aggressive entry into the automobile fray is bullish not only for the industry but also for Musk as the world leader in it.
Old clips of Secretariat’s Triple Crown victories have become a Facebook staple. Automobiles with steering wheels are on the way to a similar fate, exalted in temples of speed or museums of archaic designs. For a little while yet, they will be served by their mentally diminutive jockeys aiming to outdrive their FSD rivals until, like chess players today, they discover that the role of humans is not competing with machines but creating new ones. Any rivals, currently caught in traffic, should be pursuing Tesla-copters.
Still, as a philosopher, Elon can be celebrated—as a superbly provocative entertainer.