By HERMAN MORRIS
In the latest Tesla investors meeting, Elon Musk made the prediction that in less than 20 years, AI-powered robots would be in everyone’s home and workplace and would be available to purchase at the relative price of a consumer grade vehicle. Tech journalists were quick to point out that this claim is almost assuredly a lie, given that Musk has repeatedly made similar claims that some sci-fi-esque technology is five to 10 years away, only to continually have to revise that estimate. Some examples are electric cars for $25,000, pneumatic tube-based mass transit, full self-driving cars, and rockets that will take humans to Mars.
All of these promises have failed to materialize under his leadership despite being perpetually only a few more years away. This raises the question, though, of why Musk and his ventures continue to receive billions of dollars of funding for the undertakings his firms engage in—and what is he delivering in return for his efforts?
Billions in government subsidies
What defenders of Elon Musk and his firms are quick to point out is that, even when one accounts for the missed deliveries for his pie in the sky dreams, there are still R&D and manufacturing achievements occurring under his watch that are simply not happening elsewhere. In large part, this is true. SpaceX was the first organization to successfully reuse a first stage rocket from launch to launch, and Tesla to this day is still the biggest EV producer in the U.S. and has one of the biggest EV charging networks in the country.
What his supporters fail to acknowledge, though, is that this is all being done on the back of billions of dollars of government contracts and subsidies, non-union labor, and flagrant disregard for the environmental impacts of his ventures. The reality is that while human society is still fully capable of making tremendous leaps in industrial organization and research, very rarely is private capital able to be deployed productively to achieve those gains.
The reliance on state funding can be felt in almost every aspect of Musk’s venture. Government contracts fuel SpaceX and the Boring Company. For example, NASA has awarded SpaceX $4.4 billion for contracts in which its new Starship rocket would be used to land astronauts on the moon. And the Pentagon is looking to give SpaceX billions of dollars more to build satellites to be used as part of a new military and spying network in outer space, which would be launched with SpaceX rockets.
In the meantime, Tesla is able to chalk up roughly a quarter of all the net profits that it reports to a complicated regulatory program that allows it to sell clean energy credits earned from the U.S. government. This is in conjunction with a program of union busting, as the original Tesla auto factory in Fremont (and as of 2022, the most productive Tesla factory in the U.S.) is a non-union shop despite repeated attempts to organize.
All of this coheres into a system in which massive amounts of public wealth are transferred to the control of a single person, who is only able to deliver on a fraction of his promises through a robust program of disciplining labor and cutting regulatory corners.
The future today, but for whom?
There is a political dimension to what Musk promises and what he delivers. Musk paints a picture of a utopian future where tech innovation and large-scale production become a democratizing force allowing even the low-wage working class to, for example, purchase an electric vehicle (and this was the stated goal of Tesla for over a decade). However, what has been delivered instead is a mostly luxury line of cars, with the cheapest option only being available to the top layers of the working class who happen to qualify for an EV tax credit and live within a still small electric-charging network.
Most importantly, trying to address the real climate issue generated by U.S. car production and usage by exclusively advocating electric cars is a fool’s errand. Without a massively expanded mass transit network, there is little hope of actually getting to the emission levels we need.
Ironically, the Boring Company is undertaking one of the most important and difficult tasks of improving transportation in the metro areas of the United States, namely that of digging large underground tunnels. For all that trouble, instead of outfitting it with high-density rail transit that is affordable to the people who need it to commute, he is opting to make it a one lane highway exclusive to Teslas.
SpaceX straightforwardly proposes a mission that is elite and closed off. Even if the firm does figure out how to transport humans to Mars, the cost and time away from family and work to make a trip to the planet would exclude all but the very few who could go on a journey Musk himself says will end in their death.
It is easy to imagine what the likely outcome of the Tesla robot is, then. There is plenty of reason to doubt the success of the venture in the first place, but if Tesla is somehow able to make the industrial and research breakthroughs necessary to mass produce and productively deploy general-purpose autonomous robots, it won’t be for the benefit of all of society.
Instead of reducing the time and effort that workers need to perform their tasks—i.e., reducing the amount of hours on the job without a reduction in pay—robots will be almost exclusively used to throw out of work some of the most desperate and marginalized layers of the working class. The layoffs will be focused on those who do the hardest and most repetitive tasks of industrial and domestic labor. So even if this venture is successful on capitalist terms, it is still a loss for the workers, who wouldn’t be able to secure a just transition and have no path to enjoying the benefits of this technology for themselves.
Large-scale research and development projects can bring society a lot of good. Vaccines, leaps in computer technology, and industrial production of home goods have obviously been beneficial to society at large. The issue is that increasingly large projects are being conducted under private direction, private profit, and exclusive use. This is ironic as these same projects are not possible for people like Musk without significant state backing, and the strictest cost-saving measures such as using the cheapest labor possible while dodging environmental policies. Vastly increased waste, power demands, and greenhouse gas emissions have been associated with the AI “revolution,” and Musk’s AI-based robots will undoubtedly add to the problem.
Instead of giving away our societal wealth to be squandered by an increasingly unstable and walled-off elite, workers should have the right to democratically determine what sorts of projects and research are needed to progress our society and to carry that work out under democratic control of their working conditions. Working people already know better than any single billionaire the most important tasks to improve society since they already have to live with the consequences of the crises we face today.
With the deepening crisis of climate change, there is more work needed than ever before to save our planet from the absolute worst effects. If we continue to allow people like Musk to make decisions on how our economy is run, we will waste what time and money we have left.
Photo: Elon Musk (Business Today)