Elon Musk says let criminals out of prison and give them a robot stalker instead

At today’s Tesla shareholder meeting, Tesla CEO Elon Musk got right to the point in making his trademark ridiculous pronouncements, suggesting that criminals should be let out of prison and followed by a crime-preventing robot instead.

Tesla’s shareholder meeting is underway, and the big headline is that shareholders have enthusiastically voted against their own interests, diluting their own voting rights and handing more control of the company to the one person on Earth currently negatively affecting its business the most, CEO Elon Musk.

But that’s just the boring financial stuff. Who cares about being stuck with a bad CEO who’s responsible for dropping sales and earnings, destroying brand reputation, and working to make policy more difficult for Tesla to do business in. We wanna talk about robots!!!

And Musk gave us just what we wanted: a bunch of promises for what will happen with Tesla’s Optimus robot. The robots aren’t very useful so far, but have been showing improvement over time.

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That said, Musk’s pronouncements tend to be a little premature. He has stated that Optimus will be worth $25 trillion in market cap for Tesla… or wait, I mean $30 trillion (yes, he changed that number over the course of a few sentences at last year’s shareholder meeting). He’s also said that Optimus will constitute an “enormous robot army” which he wants to “control”, and that getting these robots out will increase the size of the economy by 10x or more.

But we got a new one today, and it’s a bit of a doozy. Here’s the full quote:

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. 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.

So let’s unpack this.

Not only would prisoners get let out of prison, they’d also be rewarded with a robot worth tens of thousands of dollars. They could use that robot for anything, but it would constantly surveil them, reporting and/or stopping any crime that the person attempts.

This would require some pretty advanced abilities from the robot, which seem to be even ahead of what the best human detectives can do. It would need to, at a minimum:

• Predict human behavior.
• Have full surveillance abilities and the ability to phone home and call for help.
• Have some sort of combat ability to subdue dedicated crime-doers.
• Be able to follow a human anywhere they go.
• Be able to work for at least as long a day as a human can, and charge autonomously in any location a human might sleep.
• Would need to be able to do all these things while detached from an energy source (recently, Optimus handed out candy in Times Square, but needed to be plugged in for this light, stationary work).

Those are some tall orders for a robot that have seemingly been teleoperated during public outings.

The proposal also conflicts with some of Musk’s supposed political positions. While a true “libertarian” (as Elon has often claimed to be, despite showing otherwise) would typically favor reducing state control of individuals, they would also typically oppose extensive state surveillance.

Having a robot stalker permanently following every person convicted of a crime would certainly expand state surveillance, and would cost a good amount of money too, given Musk wants to give each of these surveillees a “free” Optimus (presumably, paid for by government – but I suppose he doesn’t hate government expenditures when they go into his pocket).

And of course, the concept that Musk wants to “control” all of these robots, and the fact that he has separately spent most of his political advocacy actively advancing white supremacy and sympathizing with Nazis for the last several years should give anyone paying attention some pause. This advocacy has also included a lot of “tough on crime” stances, so letting people out of prison seems inconsistent with that – especially if it involves giving them an item that he thinks will be the most useful consumer product ever.

What do you think about Elon’s idea to stalk every criminal with a free robot?

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