Steve Jobs 傳記作者 Walter Isaacson 確認為 Elon Musk 寫傳
Pool via Getty Images
在 2011 年曾為 Steve Jobs 寫過傳記的 Walter Isaacson，現已確認會成為 Elon Musk 新傳記的作者。此前在六月時，Fox Business 曾報導過 Isaacson 與 Musk 商談合作可能性的流言。時至今日 Musk 自己發推證實了這一消息，並稱新書將涵蓋他在 Tesla、SpaceX 的工作以及「各種生活雜事」。
If you’re curious about Tesla, SpaceX & my general goings on, @WalterIsaacson is writing a biography — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 5, 2021
實際上，在 2015 年已經有另一位作者 Ashlee Vance 為 Musk 寫過一本名為《Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future》的傳記。但考慮到在那之後 Tesla、SpaceX 等 Musk 名下的公司又取得了不少值得再書的成就，多一本新傳記也能讓人更好地了解矽谷「鋼鐵人」的事蹟吧。
目前 Isaacson 尚未正式就為 Musk 寫傳一事發表回應，但從六月起他就一直有在 Twitter 上分享 SpaceX 相關的內容。之前的 Jobs 傳記後來還被 Aaron Sorkin 改編成了電影，不知 Musk 的故事未來是不是也會被搬上大銀幕呢？
Musk admits Full Self-Driving system ‘not great,’ blames a single stack for highway and city streets – TechCrunch
It hasn’t even been a week since Tesla hosted its AI Day, a livestreamed event full of technical jargon meant to snare the choicest of AI and vision engineers to come work for Tesla and help the company achieve autonomous greatness, and already CEO Elon Musk is coming in with some hot takes about the “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) tech.
Just drove FSD Beta 9.3 from Pasadena to LAX. Much improved! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2021
In a tweet on Tuesday, Musk said: “FSD Beta 9.2 is actually not great imo, but Autopilot/AI team is rallying to improve as fast as possible. We’re trying to have a single tech stack for both highway & city streets, but it requires massive [neural network] retraining.”
This is an important point. Many others in the autonomous space have mirrored this sentiment. Don Burnette, co-founder and CEO of Kodiak Robotics, says his company is exclusively focused on trucking for the moment because it’s a much easier problem to solve. In a recent Extra Crunch interview, Burnette said:
One of the unique aspects of our tech is that it’s highly customized for a specific goal. We don’t have this constant requirement that we maintain really high truck highway performance while at the same time really high dense urban passenger car performance, all within the same stack and system. Theoretically it’s certainly possible to create a generic solution for all driving in all conditions under all form factors, but it’s certainly a much harder problem.
Because Tesla is only using optical cameras, scorning lidar and radar, “massive” neural network training as a requirement is not an understatement at all.
Despite the sympathy we all feel for the AI and vision team that may undoubtedly be feeling a bit butthurt by Musk’s tweet, this is a singular moment of clarity and honesty for Musk. Usually, we have to filter Tesla news about its autonomy with a fine-tuned BS meter, one that beeps wildly with every mention of its “Full Self-Driving” technology. Which, for the record, is not at all full self-driving; it’s just advanced driver assistance that could, we grant, lay the groundwork for better autonomy in the future.
Musk followed up the tweet by saying that he just drove the FSD Beta 9.3 from Pasadena to LAX, a ride that was “much improved!” Do we buy it? Musk is ever the optimist. At the start of the month, Musk said Tesla would be releasing new versions of its FSD every two weeks at midnight California time. Then he promised that Beta 9.2 would be “tight,” saying that radar was holding the company back and now that it’s fully accepted pure vision, progress will go much faster.
There is always a lot of cleanup after a major code release. Beta 9.2 will be tight. Still some fundamentals to solve for Beta 10, but now that we’re pure vision, progress is much faster. Radar was holding us back. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 31, 2021
Perhaps Musk is just trying to deflect against the flurry of bad press about the FSD system. Last week, U.S. auto regulators opened a preliminary investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot, citing 11 incidents in which vehicles crashed into parked first responder vehicles. Why first responder vehicles in particular, we don’t know. But according to investigation documents posted on the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration’s website, most of the incidents took place after dark. Poor night vision is definitely a thing with many human drivers, but those kinds of incidents just won’t fly in the world of autonomous driving.
Elon Musk says Tesla Bot will be ready in a year. Can we believe him?
CNET
Elon Musk says he’ll have a humanoid robot to show off next year, but the iconoclastic entrepreneur has a mixed record with such promises and predictions. It’s worth revisiting them before you plan your next moving day around the Tesla Bot’s debut.
Last week at Tesla’s AI day event, Musk announced the auto company would have a prototype ready as soon as next year to help with tasks that are boring, repetitive or dangerous. As proof of concept, Musk shared a PowerPoint and welcomed a dancer in a Tesla Bot bodysuit on stage. It was all a bit reminiscent of the failed Cybertruck armor glass demonstration that resulted in two broken windows on stage.
Now playing: Watch this: Tesla’s building a robot
The promise of a domestic robot is also a bit hard to swallow when Tesla is debuting in its cars a “full self-driving” option which, as my CNET colleague Brian Cooley argues, doesn’t deliver on its name. Even Musk himself admitted Monday that the current beta “is actually not great.”
It’s almost too easy to be skeptical of Musk’s promises. He’s burned us so many times in the past. But that’s also a bit of a glass-half-empty outlook, no? This is the same man who has arguably revolutionized at least two industries – automotive and space launch – in the past decade while also making headway on others, like broadband internet access with SpaceX’s Starlink service.
The problem is Musk promises not just revolutions, but far more transcendent accomplishments, like moving millions to Mars or merging humans with AI. So how do you evaluate what to believe from a man who, as a result of having superhuman goals, delivers both revolution and disappointment at the same time?
Let’s look back at Musk’s track record for some insight.
Sleeping through the commute
Tesla
In 2014, Musk famously predicted that self-driving systems would be advanced enough by 2020 that “you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination.”
Seven years later, Tesla has clearly made progress toward that goal, but what it calls full self-driving is still really advanced driver assistance, and falling asleep on the way to work is still a very bad (and illegal) idea. The debate over exactly how much autonomy Tesla currently offers was on display earlier this year when Musk promised full Level 5 autonomy by the end of 2021, but a company engineer walked back the pledge in communications with regulators less than three months later. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
By the way, this is all happening after the close of 2020, which was the deadline Musk set in 2019 for Tesla to have a million robotaxis on the road. At the time, Musk noted that he’s often not on time with such pledges but did promise that Tesla would get it done. Now we’re left to wonder about the odds of seeing Tesla Bots in homes before fleets of robotaxis hit the road.
Now playing: Watch this: Musk predicts 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road next…
Still, there’s reason to believe Tesla and Musk will get it done eventually. The company has reached one audacious milestone, first verbalized by Musk in 2015, which was that the automaker could be worth as much as Apple (over $700 billion at the time) by the year 2025.
Earlier this year, Tesla’s market value passed $800 billion for the first time. Meanwhile, Apple is worth over $2 trillion, but that’s still a remarkable gain from Tesla’s roughly $25 billion valuation in 2015.
Moving to Mars
Musk’s other major success has been with SpaceX, the rocket company he founded in 2002 to work on his magnum opus: making humanity a multiplanetary species by sending as many of us as possible to pioneer life on Mars. Back then, when people weren’t paying nearly as much attention to Musk’s predictions, he hoped to make it to the red planet by 2010.
Instead, it took six years for SpaceX to make it to orbit for the first time, in 2008. Since then, the company has pioneered and perfected the practice of landing and reusing rockets, launched the most powerful rocket in the world today in the Falcon Heavy, and transported astronauts to the International Space Station in the first new crew vehicle developed in decades.
NASA
While all this was underway, SpaceX also initiated a massive satellite broadband service, called Starlink, that’s already signed up 100,000 customers. The company has so come to dominate the space industry that when NASA went to award contracts for the human landing system that’ll send astronauts back to the lunar surface this decade, SpaceX was the sole awardee.
It’s a remarkable track record, and yet it doesn’t live up to Musk’s own hype.
His timeline for getting to Mars has been pushed back repeatedly, to 2018, then 2022, 2024… For now, the focus is temporarily on getting Artemis astronauts to the moon, something then-President Donald Trump promised NASA would do by 2024. NASA hasn’t backed off that target under the Biden administration, despite the majority of observers often finding it to be a laughable goal given the glacial pace of development for the agency’s next-generation Space Launch System.
But with Musk and SpaceX officially in the mix and developing Starship for missions to the moon, the rhetoric has changed a bit, led by the man himself. As early as 2019, Musk was predicting Starship could send astronauts to the moon by 2023, a goal he’s recently reiterated.
Probably sooner — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 15, 2021
Meanwhile, SpaceX has already missed an “aspirational” goal of sending Starship on its first orbital flight in July. Though Musk says the huge vehicle is nearly ready to fly, it still faces months of regulatory hurdles that make a first trip to space this year seem less likely.
So, just as with Tesla, don’t bet against SpaceX getting where it plans to go, but certainly don’t assume that’ll happen as soon as Musk would like.
Caught in the hyperloop
With Musk’s two main ventures described above, he seems to simply be impatient or may even use those impossible timelines to motivate employees while simultaneously keeping the public interested. Either way, results trail the hype (even if at a distance) fairly consistently.
But with Musk’s side projects, the results have been more uneven.
Now playing: Watch this: Road testing the Boring Company Loop under Las Vegas
Take hyperloop, the super-fast monorail-type transport in a vacuum tube that Musk open-sourced in a white paper in 2013. He acknowledged at the time that he didn’t have the bandwidth to devote to developing the technology, but he continued to work on the project on the side, hosting pod development competitions, starting the Boring Company to improve tunnel construction and undertaking a couple of demonstration projects, notably in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, under the rebranded name Loop.
Musk pitched Loop as a way to skip traffic via a network of high-speed pods and skates underground that can move passengers and vehicles at up to twice the surface freeway speed limit.
So far though, the pilot projects in Las Vegas and near SpaceX headquarters in California are nothing more than tiny tunnels where human drivers behind the wheels of Teslas ferry passengers across short distances at relatively low speeds. Still waiting for the revolution on this one.
Musk inside your head
Musk is also behind schedule to deliver what’s been promised with another of his smaller efforts, Neuralink. The long-term vision here is a truly futuristic mind merge between individual human brains and artificial intelligence via brain-computer interfaces. Musk sees it as a way for humanity to keep up with the development of powerful general AI, which he’s long deemed an existential threat.
CNET
In the short term, the plan is to develop an assistive technology for people with conditions like paralysis.
In 2019 Musk said: “We hope to have this, aspirationally, in a human patient by the end of this year. So it’s not far.”
But so far the news out of Neuralink has been a little uneven. A few media events have featured pigs with brain implants and a monkey that Neuralink said could control a game of Pong via wireless brain implants. Human trials, scientific publications and other data have been slow to emerge, however. An earlier goal of bringing Neuralink to market in 2021 certainly doesn’t seem to be happening.
Now playing: Watch this: Neuralink’s latest monkey brain chip demo explained
So what to take from all this? A couple of things are clear: Musk can’t help but project into the future on almost any subject that lands on his radar, and his timelines can’t be trusted. If Elon Musk promises to deliver your pizza in 30 minutes, go out for dinner and look forward to having that pizza sometime next week.
Also, remember that this guy spends a lot of nights sleeping in Tesla facilities or in a tiny home at the Starship development campus. He’s got quite a grasp of what’s possible in the automotive and space domains, but when he’s chiming in on almost any other topic, whether it’s Dogecoin or even humanoid robots, maybe consider some healthy skepticism.
Boston Dynamics Atlas parkour failures. pic.twitter.com/BaY4Sx9R74 — MachinePix (@MachinePix) August 17, 2021
Musk may like to consider Tesla a robotics company, but outfits like Boston Dynamics probably have something to say about engineering for the multiple degrees of freedom a humanoid form suggests. No one has ever seen a Model III jump, dance or do a back flip, after all.
I reached out to Musk for comment via Tesla and SpaceX but did not hear back.
So will we see Tesla Bot next year? Maybe. But something tells me Musk might get distracted by other commitments.