Earlier this month Tesla ran an amazing demonstration of its Optimus robots. They danced, they played games, they poured drinks. Amazing stuff.
This is a Tesla tannoy that they are turning to AI/Robotics as their next big thing, and so every October they have run an AI Day which this year was called “We Robot”.
Here are a few samples …
Investors and others invited to the event were very excited by all this.
There is however one little flaw here, things are not as they appear to be.
These are not wholly independent machines using AI, it was all an illusion. Each Optimus was human controlled.
Yea, this is yet another instance of “Fake it until you make it”, and right now it is very much “Fake it”.
Here it was a rather deliberate bit of deception. The fact that Optimus was human operated was kept hidden and behind the scenes, and it was implicit that these mechanical wonders were fully autonomous. What those who attended got was Technology Propaganda.
Somewhere in a back room each Optimus had a human in a motion capture suit that fed a signal, and so that it would mimic what the human was doing.
If Optimus really could independently interact with humans like this it would have been a huge leap forward … but this demo was not that.
Tesla do appear to have made some interesting advances. Engineers behind the curtain confirm that there really is some AI in play here, for example to walk, but that’s where most in this field are at.
In the past there has been something very much akin to what Tesla just did.
Am I making this up?
Not at all. While not transparently revealed at the event itself, news has leaked out confirming this …
Has there ever been an instance of a mechanical man that was really operated by human being used to fool lots of people?
Sure, the most famous example is The Mechanical Turk, so let’s briefly cover that.
The Mechanical Turk
In 1770 Wolfgang von Kempelen created a chess playing machine to impress Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. It was a box that had a life-size mechanical head and torso on top along with a chess board. The machine was dressed with a Ottoman robes, had a turban, and also a black beard, hence was called the Mechanical Turk.
If you opened the cabinet on the left you could see complexity – lots of brass cogs and clockwork, hence it looked like it was basically some very smart form of machinery.
When you played Chess it was really good at it and played a very strong game.
For 84 years this device did tours and amazed many people until in 1854 it was destroyed when a fire swept through the museum where it was being kept at that time.
As you can perhaps guess, it was a hoax. The illusion was enabled via a guy sitting inside the box.
Many famous people such as Napoleon Bonaparte and even Benjamin Franklin played against it and lost, basically because it was being run by chess masters. We now know example who – Johann Allgaier, Boncourt, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis, Jacques Mouret, and William Schlumberger.
Here is a reconstruction that shows what it looked like …
… and here is an advertisement for a tour of it in London …
It was also seen on Tour in both Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
It’s amazing to appreciate that the secret of how it really worked was kept secret for over 84 years.
You might indeed think, “Yes but in 2024 we could never be fooled by a human pretending to be a smart machine like that, we are far too smart for that now“
Then Teslaand Elon, upon hearing that, pops up and says, “Hold my beer and watch this“.
I want the 2026 one.