Discussion about this post

User's avatar
radicaledward's avatar

I think the simple answer is just that Musk and many people like him are huge dorks. They read SF as kids and watched things like The Jetsons and especially Star Wars and their dream has always been to make those stupid robots real.

It's why all these Silicon Valley maniacs who didn't understand the lessons of cyberpunk fiction have spent their lives trying to make cyberpunk dystopias real all while believing that's a good thing.

So it has nothing to do with efficiency or anything. It's just idiots with too much money who never grew up.

Expand full comment
Mari, the Happy Wanderer's avatar

This was terrific, and makes me think of my reaction when Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta and tanked the company’s stock price: tech billionaires are really weird and different from us normies. The things tech billionaires think are awesome--virtual reality and humanoid robots, for example--the rest of us are indifferent to or creeped out by. We don’t buy it, literally. The robots that actually make sense in our world are the ones assisting with surgery, performing specific tasks on assembly lines and in warehouses, and the like.

And I laughed at the bit about your dog and the fridge. My husband likes to sing a little song to our dog, which includes the line, “You are so feeble you can’t even get into the treat cupboard. Everyone else in the house can get into the treat cupboard.”

Expand full comment
11 more comments...

No posts