Absolutely scathing analysis is coming from Forbes, alleging Tesla robotics are just a clumsy fraud.

…while it’s cool to see a company like Tesla tinkering with robotics, it seems like we still have a long ways to go before we’re sharing our homes with robot servants—a promise of the future we’ve been waiting on for over a century. Optimus doesn’t appear have capabilities beyond anything we could do in 1964…

Just one century? That sounds like the original mechanical Turk story from the 1700s, if we really want to go back in time. And three centuries of such experience is why wise Germans tend to call Tesla products today “Getürked” (fraud).

Consider now how little has changed since the 1700s, in terms of charlatans and con-artists.

Fun fact: Driverless cars — road robots — run the same long timeline as other modern robots. They all basically are post-WWII science fiction.

Heavily promoted in the 1960s as our inevitable future, the buzz almost entirely died out by the 1970s (not least of all because the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam War destroyed trust in automation systems).

This is not to say hard problems can’t be solved. Rather that the people actually solving hard problems will fail wherever charlatans roam unregulated, because fraud destroys markets.

Attention-obsessed charlatans tend to burn so brightly they suck all the oxygen out of innovation, undermining authentic engineers as a perceived threat to false status.

Without fraud there would be no Tesla.