MEANWHILE... IN THE FUTURE

Catching rockets with chopsticks isn't the only autonomous tech going on in Elon Musk's world...

- JACK RIX

I’ve just been served a draught mocktail from a suspiciously slick talking robot in a pinny, squeezed past a long queue for the church of merch’ and hitched a ride in a taxi without wheel or pedals down MDF streets of wild west saloons and Manhattan apartment blocks. I’m half expecting to wake up any second in a pool of sweat. Instead, the hallucination continues I strike up a conversation with a dad dancing humanoid robot, it tells me a joke, I wonder why they’ve uploaded the personality of Ned Flanders. I bump into YouTuber and TG contributor Marques Brownlee, hoping for a crumb of normality. This is definitely their most chaotic event,” he confirms. Oh _ look, there’s an inflatable dinosaur in the back of a Cybertruck.”

Technically we’re at the Warner Bros studio lot for the launch of Tesla’s Robotaxi, really we’re participating in a dress rehearsal for Elon Musk’s autonomously driven, robot assisted vision of our future. He leaps onto the stage, stumbles through a script, occasionally answering questions yelled out by the audience, and proceeds to paint a picture of a world where we get all the dead time spent driving back to do whatever is it we like to do. Where car parks become green spaces, crashes become few and far between, every home has an Optimus buddy’ to do the chores and where running a small fleet of Cybercabs becomes a lucrative hustle. He goes on to claim itll be in production by 2026 and cost from under 30,000. He also shows an autonomous 20-seater Robovan that looks like an unhitched Airstream trailer, and has iRobot director Alex Proyas reaching for his lawyer’s phone number. It’s a lot.