Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Why you should NEVER believe Elon Musk!" video.

Imagine how they feel about the claims "Tesla has just won the robot contest!" I am an engineer who has worked in industrial robotics and I think the humanoid robot claims are horribly overrated. I actually think a lot of what companies like Boston Dynamics is garbage. We don't need electronic dogs and we don't need to replace people. We do need some of the things those robots do but they are NOT the panacea that gets hyped up in the media.
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@mgc7199 Yeah but not only are engineers (I'm one) oblivious to that concept so are economists. In fact the main reason an engineers installs a robot is because an economist has made the decision to replace the human. I can tell you for a fact I have had people say to my face "You engineers cost people their jobs" and in many cases they are not wrong. I used to work in manufacturing making automated machinery often with robots. And every industrial robot is doing a job that a human could be doing. The fact however is that most of the jobs robots do humans wont do or wont do for very long. In most cases they are either dangerous or incredibly repetitive or both. In robotics there's a few sayings with a similar theme. "Robots don't get RSI, don't have union reps and best of all don't have lawyers." "Robots don't need doctors or rehab." "Management doesn't need to deal with HR when they buy a robot." I can actually talk for hours on the subject of automation, where its good, where its bad and where the general public are badly misinformed.
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@mgc7199 I'm actually Australian and I used to argue with my brother that we had to keep a manufacturing industry. That needed more automation not less. On one hand that was to be competitive, but more to the point not everybody can be a programmer. The idea that some have expressed that you can just retrain factory workers to code is utter nonsense. What the economists never worked out (because they are all taught the same stupid nonsense) is that every factory worker is a value adder. We used to have a lot of talk about value adding in Australia until the service industry hawks grabbed the microphone and started yelling. They wanted everyone to become coders and stock traders and other "what they perceived" more useful professions. It was a totally delusional standpoint and we have paid a staggering cost for that delusion. its what we got for sending some of our people to places like Harvard, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford.
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Derek Muller actually has a science education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Muller#Early_life_and_education So he has no excuse for not seeing through Elon's garbage. The fascination with tech billionaires is that they make average people feel "techie" if that's even a word. If you have a look at them they mainly do stuff that make technologies more accessible. Even go back in time to Henry Ford. His brilliance was making the car accessible to everyone. He's one of those accessibility stores I know about. I grew up in a town not far from where Derek Muller was born. He's from a town called Traralgon and I'm from Warragul. I actually went to college in America and did aerospace engineering at the U. of Illinois. Not as famous as some schools but in the late 80s it was pretty much the world center of supercomputing. We had this odd system called Plato. It was one of the worlds first wide area data base systems, but it was a pig to use. It was so bad most of us refused to use it. Everything was in text, no pictures, no graphics and it was so slow you would fall asleep using it. To this day I suspect we were being used as lab rats with that system. But the computers we all started using were these cute little boxes from "that fruit company" called a Macintosh. They were just great for typing up term papers. They gave us 2 rooms full of them and they were packed 24/7. You could go in there at 3am and still have to wait. So a couple of the geniuses from the supercomputing group decided they would make Plato as easy to use as an Apple. They weren't really the first to try it but they were the first to succeed. Their program was called Mosaic, their company was called NetScape and the web browser you are reading this on right now is the result of their work in making computers accessible to everyone. I don't know about others but Marc Andreessen is estimated to be worth $1.7Billion. And yes I sometimes wish I'd done computer engineering instead of aerospace.
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