Category Archives: Futurism

Provided by Futurism It's not clear yet whether a driver filmed sleeping behind the wheel of a speeding Tesla was sleeping while on autopilot on Queen Elizabeth Way in Canada.Playin' Possum

It's not clear yet whether a driver filmed sleeping behind the wheel of a speeding Tesla was faking or really out cold but either scenario would be extremely dangerous.

Earlier this week, Canadian news outlet City News spoke with a witness who nabbed a 20-second clip of a driver in a white TeslaModel Sflying downthe Queen Elizabeth Way highway in Ontario, Canada during a morning commute.

"He opened his eyes for a split second because of the Sun, then didnt open them again the entire time we were watching," the woman told the pub.

Research

The woman estimated the driver had his eyes closed for another 10 to 15 minutes, but seemingly woke up and took control of the car as he approached the city.

Local cops told City News they wished they had received a formal complaint so they could have responded to the sleeping beauty.

"Seeing it on the video is concerning," Ontario Provincial Police Sergeant Kerry Schmidt told the outlet. "The circumstances surrounding it are unverified. I dont know if this is something that someone came across or if its a publicity stunt. Obviously, this is someone asleep at the wheel; apparently, not paying attention to what is happening in front of them is very concerning."

Astute Twitter observers said it's possible to fool Tesla's Autopilot feature, saying that weighting the steering wheel could override the requirement that the driver touch the wheel every so often.

Whether it was planned or not, Tesla drivers using assisted driving features are still responsible for their own vehicles. And they're responsible for any lives taken by their vehicle, too.

More on Teslaland news: Experts Say Elon Musk Is Wrong About the Population Thing He Keeps Saying

The post Video Appears to Show Tesla Driver Completely Asleep on Highway appeared first on Futurism.

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Video Appears to Show Tesla Driver Completely Asleep on Highway

For a captain of industry, Elon Musk sure has interesting ideas about intellectual property.

This week, the world's richest man tweeted a black and white comic that depicted Nintendo's Mario and Peach characters sitting on the roof of a building discussing life.

"Of course," the text reads, "there's no way to prove we're living in a simulation."

It's a moderately funny joke two videogame musing about whether they do in fact live in a virtual world and it also riffs on Musk's longstanding interest in the theory that we, like Mario and Peach in the comic, might live in a simulated universe.

But the authorship of the comic raises issues far more banal. Musk has long been known to post memes without credit, and this was no exception. Except that this time, instead of just calling him out, Futurism was actually the victim of the heist.

Yes, folks the comic Musk tweeted out, gaining hundreds of thousands of engagements, was an illustration from our now-defunct Futurism Cartoons.

In fact, on the top of the original image are watermarks crediting Futurism and the authors of the comic, Luke Kingma and Lou Patrick Mackay. In the version Musk posted on Sunday, both credits were cropped out.

This is far from the first time the SpaceX and Tesla CEO has stolen meme art from the little guys. Over the last year alone, Futurism has published at least two blogs about memeshe seems to have lifted.

So prevalent is Musk's meme-stealing propensity that theNew York Timesran awhole expos on it last year, questioning whether the father of nine to ten children actually lives up to his "meme lord" representation.

Musk's laissez faire attitude toward crediting others' work extends beyond memes as well. Back in 2018, it emerged that Tesla had using an image by a smalltime artist to show off new tech in its vehicles without credit or compensation.

Called out for the oversight, Musk was stridently unapologetic.

"He can sue for money if he wants, but thats kinda lame," he said in response. "If anything, this attention increased his mug sales."

In a certain light, Musk's meme theft makes perfect sense. On a meta level, rich people often steal even when they have no rational reason to do so. Musk has also dealt with the accusation of lifting much larger ideas as well, including Tesla itself.

That said, it's particularly weird and even a little sad that the richest guy on the planet feels like he has to pilfer some of the lowest-hanging fruit of the meme world when he could hire the world's best content creators or at very least, the prolific alleged meme stealer FuckJerry to make him the dankest memes the world has ever seen.

More Muskiness:There's a Huge Problem With Elon Musk's Promise to Bring Starlink to Iran

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Elon Musk Cropped The Credit Out of Our Cartoon and Tweeted It Out - Futurism

Okay, this is pretty cool.DreamFusion

DreamFusion, Google's next-gen, AI-powered text-to-3D-image generator, is here.

Well, sort of. A proof-of-concept paper is here, at least. DreamFusion is an evolution of Dream Fields, a text-to-3D-image generator revealed by Google back in 2021. And like Dream Fields, DreamFusion creates its 3D images by combining a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) or a neural network that can create synthetic 3D scenes using partial 2D datasets with a pre-trained text-to-image prompt model.

The twist? Unlike Dream Fields, which utilized OpenAI's CLIP technology as that latter pre-trained model, DreamFusion now uses its own: Imagen, Google's DALL-E 2 competitor.

So, basically, Google booted Elon Musk's OpenAI tech and figured out how to use its own. Keeping things in-house smart.

"Happy to announce DreamFusion, our new method for Text-to-3D!" Ben Poole, a research scientist at Google Brain and co-author of the proof-of-concept paper, wrote on Twitter. "We optimize a NeRF from scratch using a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. No 3D data needed!"

While the DreamFusion models aren't totally realistic, they're admittedly pretty impressive as its creators explain the paper, the AI-generated forms that are shown off on its website are "coherent, with high-quality normals, surface geometry and depth, and are relightable with a Lambertian shading model."

In other words, while they might not be as convincingly realistic as some of those photorealistic DALL-E 2 images (yet), they have all of the right elements. The proportions are right, the depth makes sense, and so on. And not to shade OpenAI, but this next version of the tech is certainly a visual improvement from its first iteration.

It's unclear when DreamFusion or whatever comes next will be available to the public, though we can definitely see a number of applications already.Just think of the value to indie game developers alone!And according to Twitter, it's already been used to 3D-print a ghost eating a hamburger, so cheers to that.

More on text-to-image generators: Researcher Says an Image Generating AI Invented Its Own Language

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Google Creates AI That Turns Text Into 3D Objects - Futurism

Avast ye landlubbers!Knee-Deep

Teslas elusive Cybertruck has had fanboys and potential buyers excited for years since it was first unveiled in 2019. Its not hard to see why, with its sleek, polygonal features looking like something rendered in the original 1982 "Tron," and claims of remarkable durabilityand bulletproof glass that sounds like the selling points of an action figures car.

Piling on all that, heres another claim from Tesla CEO Elon Musk: the EV truck will also double as a boat, he says.

"Cybertruck will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes and even seas that arent too choppy," said Musk in a tweet. "Needs [to] be able to get from Starbase to South Padre Island, which requires crossing the channel."

In all likelihood, Musks tweet is probably just him being facetious once again, but you can never be sure. In 2020, Musk tweeted that the truck could "even float for a while," but did not go as far to equate it to an actual watercraft like he did today. (Interestingly, one overly-eager company already envisioned an amphibious kit for the Cybertruck earlier this year.)

Its not even Musks most ridiculous claim regarding the brutalist whip. In 2019, Musk tweeted that a special "pressurized edition" of the Cybertruck would be "the official truck of Mars," further hinting that it would be aboard a planned Starship cargo mission to the Red Planet, which of course hasn't happened yet and, to be realistic, may never.

Pretty much the only claim well believe from Musk, for now, is his sobering announcement that the initially promised $39,900 price point of the Cybertruck is dead and gone, so expect to pay more than that if your eyes are set on the vehicle.

Whether it can actually double as a boat or not, Musk should probably be careful about what he puts out there, considering that people actually bought into the Mars Cybertruck hype. If the boat claims are about as not-bulletproof as the supposedly bulletproof glass, we'd recommend not planning on driving one into a pond.

More on the Cybertruck: Extremely Beat Up Tesla Cybertruck Spotted on Public Street

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Elon Musk Says the Cybertruck Will Double as a Boat - Futurism

Is this the end of NFTs?Bubble Burst

Bad month to be a nonfungible token. According to Bloomberg, NFT trading volumes are down a catastrophic 97 percent from the record highs seen back in January a sign that the market may be experiencing something less like a winter and more like a full-blown ice age.

That being said, the remaining sales aren't nothing. Per Bloomberg, September sales numbers should ring in right around $466 million. That's something, but it's a far cry from monthly sales totaling $19 billion, as were seen at the beginning of the year.

Diminishing NFT trading volumes have been reflected elsewhere in the market. OpenSea, the world's top NFT trading platform by trading volume, fired 20 percent of its workforce back in July, while the sad NFT spiral is situated against the backdrop that is the broader industry crash.

On that note,it's worth noting that there are some dismal macroeconomic conditions to consider, as pretty much every NFT-slash-crypto-CEO has noted during the industry's mass layoffs. Most industries are having a difficult time right now, as are everyday folks struggling with the economy. The fading hype around digital assets due in large part to a growing lack of distrust in the industry, following the crash combined with a generally uncertain financial future is likely making it a lot harder to convince consumers that spending anything from a few hundred to a few million is worth it for a JPEG image, especially in an arena rife with fraud, scams, and just downright horrible behavior.

As many experts have echoed, it's unlikely that we're seeing the absolute end of NFTs. But as the immensely overblown clout that the industry was built on continues to dwindle, prices and sales volumes will likely continue to reflect that.

In the meantime, there are a number of ways for sellers to get creative. Seriously, can you imagine where the market would be if allNFTs came with side of free weed? Something to think about.

READ MORE: NFT Trading Volumes Collapse 97% From January Peak [Bloomberg]

More on NFTs: Sleazy Project Sold NFTs of Porn Stars, But Never Got Their Permission

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It's Official: Pretty Much Nobody Is Buying NFTs Anymore - Futurism

It's not every day the public gets to read the private communications sent between the world's richest man and his fellow movers and shakers but then again,Twitter v Musk is far from a normal trial.

Take one of the biggest bombshells dropped in the case's history to date, which came yesterday as court-mandated discovery required SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to reveal his text messages regarding his flip-floppy Twitter-buying bid, which has landed him in legal hot water after he unexpectedly decided to pull out.

There's some seriously unhinged stuff in these court documents. But luckily, we've rounded up the best of them to titillate you in a timely manner.

"Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff," Musk told Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in April, per court documents. "I kinda dont think I should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems."

Oh my god, he admitted it!

At one point following Musk's announcement that he was going to try to buy Twitter and before he decided he didn't want to, actually company cofounder Jack Dorsey told the SpaceX and Tesla CEO that he thinks the right move would be to pull a Donald Trump and start his own social network.

"Yes, a new platform is needed," Dorsey told Musk. "It cant be a company. This is why I left."

Musk responded with an "OK" and a question about what such a platform would look like, with Dorsey saying that he thinks it should be "open-source" but encrypted, like the Signal messaging platform, and should run without ads.

"Twitter started as a protocol," he continued. "It should have never been a company. That was the original sin."

Tell us how you really feel, Jack!

On multiple occasions in the unredacted texts, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale sent Musk politically tinged messages that Musk seemed totally nonplussed by.

In one sent on April 4, Lonsdale lauded Musk for buying stake in the company and joining its board before offering his take on the issues the world's richest man had raised specifically regarding "censorship decisions and little cabals going on there."

"The lefties on the board likely want plausible deniability!" he jokingly added. Instead of responding, Musk simply "Liked" the message just one click from leaving his fellow tech founder on read.

In a text sent later in April, Lonsdale texted Musk to tell him he'd been on the phone with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, offering him a line through which to speak to the Republican presidential hopeful. In response, Musk just said "Haha cool." Ouch!

Shortly after announcing to the Twitter board that he wasn't going to be joining the board after all and was planning to take the company private, Musk let Steve Davis of The Boring Company in on his alternative plans.

"My Plan B is a blockchain-based version of twitter, where the 'tweets' are embedded in the transaction as comments," he wrote. "So youd have to pay maybe 0.1 Doge per comment or repost of that comment."

In response, Davis said he was "not sure" of which plan he should root for, and offered to put Musk in touch with blockchain engineers.

On multiple occasions, CBS talking head Gayle King reached out to Musk in search of an interview. In her first communiqu, sent not long after news of the deal went public, she told Musk that she is in favor of a tweet edit feature because, as she put it "we all say shit we regret want to take back [sic] in the heat of the moment."

Later, after Musk announced that he wasn't joining the Twitter board after all, she sent him another message, complete with more interesting typographical choices.

"ELON! You buying twitter or offering to buy twitter Wow!" King's text reads. "Now Dont you think we should sit down together face to face this is as the kids of today say a 'gangsta move' I dont know how shareholders turn this down ..like I said you are not like the other kids in the class."

There are, of course, hundreds more texts in the court-mandated cache released yesterday, not to mention emails, to chew on and we highly suggest you peruse them yourself if you find yourself in, shall we say, boring company and need a distraction.

More Musk:Elon Musk Cropped The Credit Out of Our Cartoon and Tweeted It Out

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Here's The Wildest Elon Musk Texts That Were Just Released in Court - Futurism