Celebrating Elon Musk Week…

I take it that you caught the Elon Musk news. I mean the bit where he now plans to buy Twitter after making headlines about not buying Twitter after making headlines about his plans to buy Twitter…

Then there were his leaked messages to other billionaires… and his new Optimus robot… and updates about his autonomous self-driving cars… and Tesla’s new Dojo supercomputer… and the bit where he advocated for a settled peace between Ukraine and Russia. Then there was his offer of unrestricted internet access to people in Iran protesting the government and in Florida where people are trying to rebuild after the recent devastating hurricane…

And that was just in the past week.

It’s an exciting time to be alive. Myself, I dream of a day when Elon Musk’s ambitions bear fruit. I imagine a future in which I can jump into my self-driving car, arrive at the local spaceport, hop onto one of SpaceX’s Starships that flies me to Mars where I am greeted by a robot servant who will escort me to the deep deep hole that’s been drilled using patented MuskTech into the core of the red planet. Then finally… FINALLY… I might be able to escape headlines about the world’s most media-obsessed billionaire.

I know I am a bit late to the party in terms of my cynicism around Musk. As a space nerd who has been hooked on every bit of progress SpaceX has made at their “Starbase” in Boca Chica, Texas, I find it surprising how Musk has become as ubiquitous as a Kardashian in our news cycle and, intellectually, far more frustrating. The Elon Musk we once knew appears to have become distracted. The man who expects his employees to work ridiculously long hours in the belief that not a second must be wasted if Mankind is to become an interplanetary species has become…

Oooh, look! A meme about butter! (“Salted butter is amazing, but should be stored at room temperature”, @ElonMusk, 14th September).

Musk has already admitted to suffering from Asperger’s, which perhaps explains the troubles he sometimes has with tone, but his lack of focus is something else. He uses his social media (soon to be HIS social media) to engage in pointless culture war banalities and pontificating on topics well outside his wheelhouse. This week alone he sparked controversy after putting up a poll in which he suggested that the Ukraine War will end with a compromise, and Russia keeping some of the land it’s grabbed. “You are assuming that I wish to be popular. I don’t care,” he said to one critic. “I do care that millions of people may die needlessly for an essentially identical outcome.” It was enough to make Andrij Melnyk, Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, tweet back, pithily: “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you @elonmusk”.

As ever in this nuanced world where complexity riddles complex outcomes, there is no sense that Musk is hugely right or wrong. At some future point, the war might well reach a stage where both sides are willing to negotiate. But in the here and now, as Ukraine makes significant gains and Putin (let’s not say this is really about Russia) faces internal dissent and low morale among his troops, Musk’s tweet felt, at the very least, like a poorly timed attempt at realpolitik. At the worst, it was the decadent fumbling of another billionaire playing with millions of lives from his lofty perch.

All told, the public face of Musk has been taking quite the battering. It also couldn’t have been more self-inflicted than if Tesla had launched their own brand of Self-Pummelling Fists. Speaking of which: Musk also made headlines last week with the launch of his new robot, ambitiously called Optimus, except this was no Transformer. There was considerable style over not very much substance. The best one could say was that it was not quite as bad as his press conference back in August last year when he announced Tesla’s plans to build a robot. That’s when a guy in a robot suit danced on stage and it was never made clear to less-observant journalists that it was just a guy in a robot outfit. This time, however, a real robot did walk out onto the stage, but it was nothing we hadn’t already seen done better by Honda’s Asimo (way back in 2000) and especially Boston Dynamics, whose robots have spent the best part of a decade performing dance routines and backflips.

Musk’s humanoid(ish) robot shuffled out and waved… very very slowly… It was mildly impressive after just a year of work (the design was refreshingly minimal with neatly concealed actuators) but there were no answers to the difficult challenges. One area where Musk is probably a world leader is in power delivery but Tesla’s promise that the 2.3kWh battery would be enough to last a full day still feels a bit ambitious given the engineers admitted that the robot’s shuffle across the stage was their first attempt to run the robot untethered. That’s also before we get to the properly difficult matter of cognition, understanding a world that hasn’t been prepared and controlled. Self-driving cars exist in the relatively structured universe of roads and junctions but that is nothing compared to the unstructured complexity of life beyond the roads. This is the hard challenge of AI that amounts to a problem considerably harder and larger than engineering a flexible hand with an opposable thumb.

“Optimus is going to be incredible in five years, ten years mind-blowing,” said Musk. He might well be right. Musk perhaps indulges himself too much in showing off unfinished products but it’s also true that seeing products fail makes their progress feel more substantial.

That is certainly true of SpaceX which continues to build at Boca Chica and now at Cape Canaveral, where they recently started to build a second Starship launch facility. Musk has been promising the first suborbital launch of Starship for the best part of a year, with SpaceX repeatedly missing his overly optimistic dates. If that launch happens this year or next and is in any way a success, then it will underscore the potential in his other big promises.

Yet it also sets his Twitter obsession in a different light. Unlike his other projects where Musk sets up companies researching cutting-edge technology, Twitter is already a mature product. It involves questions about free speech that Musk, for all his genius in engineering and software, seems to lack any critical facility. He calls himself a “free speech absolutist” but it’s yet to be seen what he means by that naïve and perhaps even dangerous term given he might soon own one of the biggest platforms where malign actors can project any manner of toxic content into a very public space.

But maybe that is the dark side of his fulsome, sometimes childlike, engagement with the future. Not always mentioned in discussions about Musk is his company, Neuralink, busy trying to construct neural interface technology. It’s the kind of technology that moves into some ethically problematic areas given it quite literally involves reading a person’s mind (glossing over, too, the issues of implanting this kind of technology into the brains of pigs and monkeys as researchers are now doing). Musk the wide-eyed child in a candy shop of his own creating is also Prometheus playing with fire that was never intended for mortals. Musk in charge of Twitter might herald better technology (an edit button, at last) but it might also draw him into a world of hard philosophy that make the trip to Mars look comparatively easy.