Elon Musk didn't invent fake tech demos

Elon Musk has been invited several times in strange threads recently (if anything, he should have invited many more) and here's the latest: At Tesla's We the Robot event this week, the Optimus robot that served drinks to attendees isn't as autonomous as Musk claims. According to several reports, the Tesla robots were operated by humans using remote controls.

But if Musk seems to be reaching new depths in his quest to make Tesla look like it has its finger on the pulse of the future (rather than a cyberdrug-shaped millstone around its neck), think again. Fake product demos – and in particular, fake autonomous machines – date back at least to the age of Napoleon.

Musk is repeating a very old trick that Benjamin Franklin fell for.

Here are some of the more well-known examples that are not remote-controlled:

Mechanical Turk, the Optimus of its day

Hidden inside was this mechanical chess player with weapons and a wardrobe – a real chess master The The product of the brass and wood era was successful in its launch.

The Turkish forge was kept under wraps for more than 80 years, and even then it inspired knock-off models. One of them, Mephisto, a chess master was operating it by remote control.

Turk's original creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, was a true innovator, a steampunk type, who worked for 20 years to successfully develop the speech synthesizer. But he's not above expending brainpower on this straight-up hoax, complete with an elaborately adapted wardrobe of pseudo-machines that disguise the human.

Kempelen tried to avoid many product demos, but relented when it turned out to be a money spinner. After his death, a musician bought Turkey and made the hidden area more elaborate.

The second owner had brass links to stop his creation against Napoleon Bonaparte – and to correct the European tyrant's illegal chess moves. Then the robot “inventors” took note: the more shameful the hoax, the more people seemed to believe it.

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Steve Jobs iPhone fake

Steve Jobs and one of the demo iPhones.
Credit: David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Speaking of tyrants, the Apple co-founder and guru is said to have famously created a “reality distortion field” around the product. And what turned out to be the most important demo day of his life was the release of the iPhone in January 2007. Jobs didn't fake one or two details.

What some fans are already calling the Jesus Phone was six months before launch, and prototype models weren't ready for prime time. To avoid crashes and freezes during his demo, Jobs used multiple prototypes and a small hand.

Each of those iPhones was designed to follow what its engineers called the “golden path.” A specific sequence of actions gives the impression that Jobs is designing his device independently at the same time. They also had what you might call a cellular distortion field: bars across the top of their screens demanding full service no matter what.

Google's voice assistant is calling… who?

These days, the Silicon Valley search firm likes to point out that it was deeply involved in AI before AI was cool. That's true — but even Google seems to be doing fake AI demos before they're cool.

At Google I/O 2018, CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated an AI-powered voice assistant that reportedly called a local hair salon and a local restaurant to make reservations live. Both businesses pick up the phone and say, “How can I help you?”

Axios quickly discovered that none of the salons and restaurants in the Mountain View area answered the phone that way. Google spokespeople did not respond to queries about this.

Gemini AI is not that fast

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What is a fake product demo? If deceptive video editing is included in the description, A Google demonstration of its AI, Gemini, will surely count from December 2023.

Many viewers did not realize that the video in question was sped up and the voiceovers were dubbed. It's still a demo that Google says is “real,” but as one user noted, “real but abstracted isn't a thing.”

Tesla's Self-Driving Scam

And one thing missing: fully self-driving (FSD) Teslas. At least, not as seen in the 2016 video, a Tesla engineer later testified. The driver was only there for legal reasons, the video said.

But the Model X in question followed a predetermined route, a Tesla engineer said when questioned last year in a lawsuit related to the death of an Apple engineer in a crash. The video showed capabilities that the car's software did not have at the time, such as stopping at a red light or accelerating on green. Many takes were edited together, and a human operator often intervened.

It was far from the only outlandish claim Musk made about self-driving technology. At the time of writing, there are more than a dozen lawsuits pending that claim customers were tricked into believing their Teslas could drive themselves, leading to injuries and deaths. Three, including the Apple engineer's case, will go to trial in 2025. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Justice Department have launched their own automated investigations.

All things considered, Musk can count himself lucky that the worst thing Tesla's remote-controlled Optimus ever did was dance and pour drinks.