How to Turn a Car Company into a Very Expensive Calculator

The world’s most famous electric vehicle company has decided that $25 billion is a reasonable amount of money to spend on "AI development" in a single year. To put that in perspective, $25 billion could buy a small country or, at the very least, a version of a social media platform that actually works. Investors are understandably nervous, watching the CEO pivot from "we make cars" to "we make sentient robots that might one day walk your dog, if the dog is okay with a 40% chance of being accidentally run over." The gamble is simple: if the AI becomes smart enough, it won't matter that the cars have panel gaps big enough to park a scooter in. The AI will simply "hallucinate" a better build quality for the customer. Critics are calling it a "Hail Mary" pass, but the CEO insists it’s a "Hail Robot" pass. The money is being funneled into supercomputers that are supposedly learning how to solve "Full Self-Driving," a goal that has been "one year away" for the last twelve years. It’s a bold strategy: spending so much money on the future that the present becomes an annoying distraction. If the gamble fails, the company will have the world's most intelligent, $25-billion-dollar bankruptcy filing.