Jeff at Coffee and Covid today quotes an enthusiastic Tesla supporter:
“Two Sundays ago, I went to Tesla with Elon and visited the Optimus lab,” Calicanis said. “There were a large number of people working on a Sunday,” he continued, “and I saw Optimus. I can tell you now, nobody will remember that Tesla ever made a car. They will only remember the Optimus.”
At the time, most folks dismissed Jason’s remarks as overheated investor hype. But now that Elon put Tesla’s money where its robots are, the comments seem strangely prescient. “He is going to make a billion of those robots,” Calicanis told the hosts. “And it is going to be the most transformative technology product ever made in the history of humanity.”
You know what would make that even better? Put the robots on the Segway Human Transporter.
Remember those? Not long after the turn of the century, luminaries in the tech field and tech press told us that cities would be designed around them (little did we know that a quarter century later, the “fifteen minute cities” would be designed, but not around the SHT, but around controlling the population) and that everyone would have them and blah blah blah.
In reality: In 2026, you can hardly even find them in tourist attractions for “Segway Tours” because they’ve been eclipsed by the far simpler electric bikes and, heaven help up, rentable electric scooters.
But the people who got paid got paid. And whether the humanoid robots transform the world or are a flashy toy replaced by simpler machines later, the people who will get paid will get paid.
