Just when you thought Elon Musk was finally done meddling in the affairs of downtrodden Americans, he comes right back with a bang.
At a recent Tesla shareholder meeting, the world’s richest man wasted no time sharing his latest asinine idea: criminals should be let out of prison and stalked by one of the company’s Optimus robots, which will make sure they don’t commit any more crimes.
“Y’know we might maybe able to give people a more — if somebody’s committed crime — a more humane form of containment of future crime,” Musk stammered. “Which is if you say, like, you now get a free Optimus and it’s just gonna follow you around and stop you from doing crime. But other than that you get to do anything. It’s just gonna stop you from committing crime, that’s really it. You don’t have to put people in prisons and stuff, I think.”
That quote, first flagged by Electrek, is the latest brain blast from a man who was awarded a $1 trillion pay package by a shareholder vote this month.
There are so many questions it’s hard to know where to even start. How will the lumbering Optimus robots possibly prevent crime in their current state? Who’s paying for this? What are the ethical implications of using a for-profit robotics platform either as an alternative or an augmentation — as usual, Musk was light on details — to the jam-packed prison and criminal justice systems?
At this point in Musk’s career, of course, it’s a fools errand to tease much meaning out of his off-the-cuff ramblings. Still, it’s worth paying attention to, at least in theory, if for no other reason than the simple fact that Musk is one of the most powerful men in the history of the US.
As Electrek points out, the real story is Tesla’s shareholders voting against their material interests, diluting their own voting rights in order to give Musk even more money and power — though of course, if AI becomes as powerful as he says it will, it’ll clearly outperform him by an immense margin.
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