I mean the guy said "the rockets will land themselves in 5 years". He might be off a couple of years but he delivered. Same with electric cars. Stands to reason he'll deliver on the Mars promise (though I think someone will beat him to the self-driving punch).

You can cherry-pick the promises that have come true. But for every one of those there's a cyber truck, a "self driving mode," etc.

That's true I'm cherry-picking but you kind of have to when people are making impossible claims. Most of them won't come true (at least, yet) but as long as some of them come true I think that's a net positive.

I agree with you. Musk is a complicated person (smell...?).

I kinda put him in the same box as Steve Jobs. They are very crappy in some ways, but you cannot argue with what they have achieved.

Would we have a 'space race' like we have now, if it wasn't for Musk? Even Bezos cannot keep up.

How long would the EV 'evolution' have taken if Musk didn't make it a priority?

There are loads of faults here, and I am not blind to them. However, I think its short-sighted to paint his goals as "lies".

That's still lying, even if you think it is net positive.

True.

1. You don't have to believe him. 2. We still get some impossible results in the end which leads to a more interesting future.

And you don't have to care that he's a liar. I care about truth, though.

Fair enough, we could probably both agree that physical results are the best outcome or promises that may/may not be true?

If we have self-landing rockets you could argue all day about truth and integrity but we'll still have self-landing rockets.

> when people are making impossible claims

Making impossible claims in investor calls, in corporate communications, to be clear, to the point where the company has later had to asterisk said claims as "visionary, not targets".

> But for every one of those there's a cyber truck, a "self driving mode," etc.

Cybertruck is entering mass production soon. Yes, it's late, but it's coming.

Same for self driving. It is clearly getting better all the time, and it's coming.

Again, he is often late delivering on very difficult and ambitious things. Have a look how the competition are doing with re-usable rockets, mass producing electric vehicles, self driving, etc.

None of these things are easy, and they take time.

> Same with electric cars.

I mean, electric cars were a thing. Not a big thing. But nonetheless. And FSD is to me a lot less impressive than implied. And on FSD, he has repeatedly well, failed to deliver - "this year, coast to coast, no interventions" is something he's said each and every year since 2016. And it still runs in to the back of stationary emergency lighted vehicles. Until last year it could barely handle roundabouts. It saw level crossings as a weird intersection with a light that was red, and then not, and then red again, with a collection of trucks crossing it.

Sure, it's hard to predict if Tesla hadn't been formed whether electric cars would be as big as they are now (perhaps another innovator would've jumped in).

I'd agree that he's failed to deliver on the FSD so far, but I mean, it'll be such a shift (when either Tesla or some other group nail it which like I said I think is the most likely) that when we look back on it in 100 years we're not going to care how far their time estimates were out by.

From Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

In 1965 I. J. Good predicted an ultraintelligent machine by 2000, Vinge (1993) predicted greater-than-human intelligence between 2005 and 2030, Yudkowsky (1996) predicted a singularity by 2021, and Kurzweil (2005) predicted human-level artificial intelligence by 2030. Moravec (1988) predicted human-level artificial intelligence in supercomputers by 2010 by extrapolating past trend using a chart, while Moravec (1998/1999) predicted human-level artificial intelligence by 2040, and intelligence far beyond human by 2050. In a 2017 interview, Kurzweil predicted human-level intelligence by 2029 and billion fold intelligence and singularity by 2045

Who do you think lied among them?

I do not hold people who make unjustifiably confident predictions in high regard. Yud and Kurzweil are the ones from your quote who I am more familiar with and they are constantly wrong and constantly overconfident. They've spent decades making wrong predictions, and they keep doing it without updating their methods. To me, that's not making mistakes, that's lying.

Lying means they knew their prediction was wrong, but they did it anyway. Are you suggesting Yud and Kurzwell knew they were wrong? What about “updating model”? If only AI can be correctly predicted by models. Don’t you see the contradiction?

Did any of them sell you kits implementing their predictions for thousands of dollars?

We are talking about Mars colonization prediction. Read first before comment?

This is the OP:

Another reminder that Elon Musk routinely lies about timelines. If Mars colonization had followed the timeline laid out here, we'd be three years from having lots of people on Mars.

And none of the ones you mentioned are talking about Mars colonization. I was just highlighting that holding people just pontificating about possible futures should not be held to the same level of scrutiny as a person saying "my company will do X in y years/months, give me money in advance".

There is a difference between saying “whatever will happen in 30 years” and saying “_my company_ will do a thing in 10 years”.

That said, these largely don’t sound _particularly_ serious?

> Moravec (1988) predicted human-level artificial intelligence in supercomputers by 2010 by extrapolating past trend using a chart

I mean, come on.

The OP asserted that Musk lied when talking about Mars colonization timeline. Are you talking about the same thing?

> That said, these largely don’t sound _particularly_ serious?

And Musk making prediction about Mars is lying?

A future projection is not a fact, so it's not a lie when it's wrong.

If I make a prediction without actually believing that my prediction is likely to happen, then I've lied.

How do you know if the person didn't believe the prediction is likely to happen? (benefit of the doubt?)

Depends on the situation, I think. Did the person otherwise behave assuming their prediction is true? Have they told anyone else that they don't really believe it? Etc.

I wasn't claiming that that Musk (or anyone in particular) was lying in my my comment. I was just pointing out that you can, in fact, lie through making speculative statements.

Ah fair enough, in the context of the thread I made that incorrect assumption that was what you were inferring.

"This year you will be able to drive coast to coast with no interventions".

"Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities. Tesla will not say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by end of calendar year."

I will develop self driving basketball shoes by tomorrow, I pinky promise.

If you had a ton of incredibly smart people working on the project, a ton of secured funding and a track record of actually delivering things that are incredibly complicated and ground breaking, then some people would choose to believe you, and they might even invest in you.

Of course, there will always be people that don't, and that's perfectly fine too.