Musk largely became the richest person on the planet off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do), nobody else would have the battery production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production), AND the promise of fully self driving cars (which will happen for Tesla immediately after flying cars).
I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption: a few benefit at the cost of everyone else.
What you're referring to doesn't exist. Right now it's vaporware, and for all we know, we could be 1 century away from solving it up to human levels.
That just simply not true. He became one of the richest people in the world when Tesla cracked really high volume productions of EVs at a quite amazing margin. That is what people didn't believe was possible when they did it in 2018.
And at the same time SpaceX, where Musk owns much more stock off, managed to re-usability operational and started to launch Starlink.
> production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production)
Tesla is by far largest BEV producer in the world so its actually true. And if you think all Tesla does is partnering with Panasonic you have not been paying attention.
Telsa has its own battery production and also is one of the largest costumers of CATL, LG and Panasonic. For quite a while Panasonic and Tesla have co-developed technology that Panasonic can just sell to anybody.
As you can see, Tesla has to be both a producer and a major consumer of most battery companies in the world to achieve the volume they do.
And others can not simply replicate it because the industry is supply constraint.
> I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption
Tesla is the largest BEV producer in the world, and just recently made a larger profit then Ford/GM combined (if I remember correctly). Tesla has industry leading margin and is still the fastest growing car company of any size.
SpaceX is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world and I don't think you will find anybody serious who disagrees with that.
The only argument you have that makes sense is that Musk over-promised Self-Driving. That is certainty true, but I wouldn't call it corruption. And I don't think that today the stock price of Tesla is hugely inflated by this as there is so much pessimism on self-driving.
If Tesla or SpaceX were to disappear tomorrow nobody would experience any existential crisis.
If you disappeared Microsoft, Apple or Amazon or Walmart overnight the whole economy would come to a halt. Same for JPMChase,WellsFargo, BoA etc.
Musk is the first guy to reach the top of the Forbes list while being at the helm of an aspirational company, not one that is structurally important one in the present.
It’s a dangerous precedent, and in fact soon enough it was repeated when bitcoiners and owners of exchanges such as Coinbase and FTX reached the top 10 of the Forbes list.
You're thinking back and white "it's not replacing...". What does that matter? To me what matters is "can we make transport better"
I thought the question was "can we actually make fully autonomous vehicles?" If we have that, the value is pretty obvious.
Less tongue in cheek: I think we should optimize city centers for human scales and activities, rather than sending cars right through them at all. We already sacrifice so much for cars in their current state, if we have to optimize for their mobility even moreso we are going in the wrong direction I feel.
I'm not saying get rid of cars, just keep them out of the cities. Put them on roads, not streets.
Cars where they are still allowed should move significantly slower, on much thinner roads.
Self-Driving will not solve anything for cities. They will solve even less then EVs.
My brother lives in the countryside (somewhere in the EU), and, as a driver, he shares the paved road just outside his house with the village’s cows (including his two cows). I don’t see any non-AGI system being able to negotiate that, as at times is difficult even for me, a reasonably AGI system, to make sense of it all when I encounter a herd of loose cows on the road.
This might be true, if rural areas and densely populated uran areas were the only 2 states, but there's a lot of intermediate density in between
This discussion is so absurd. :)
And this is just a single clip. The huge advantage Tesla has is their massive amount of training data. If it happens in the real world, they probably have a clip of it and can train on it.
Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities, cars should be much more restricted because of health effects and traffic deaths, and the less complex areas (highways) are already the bulk of the drudgery in driving, but are much easier to automate, so why not do it for there?