Lifestyle
Should Tesla carry the burden of teaching the public about artificial intelligence?
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In a recent podcast discussion Elon Musk had with AI expert Lex Fridman about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink, an interesting question arose about Tesla’s role as an educator in that realm. Referring specifically to the Smart Summon feature that’s part of the company’s Version 10 firmware, Fridman asked Musk whether he felt the burden of being an AI communicator by exposing people for the first time (on a large scale) to driverless cars.
To be honest, Musk’s response wasn’t really, well, responsive. He deferred to the more commercial-oriented goals of the company: “We’re just trying to make people’s lives easier with autonomy.” The long-term goals of Neuralink are pretty scary for mainstream humans, so to me, this question really deserves a long sit-and-think. After all, we’re talking computer self-awareness and capabilities well beyond what we’d consider superhuman and beyond the ability of humans to control after a certain point. Neuralink wants the type of AI connection implanted in our brains.
On one hand, the evolution of Autopilot with each iteration and the evolution of Smart Summon with each new release exposes people to the process of how humans teach computers and how computers teach themselves. In other words, it shows people that AI is somewhat similar to how people learn. However, I don’t know that it gives everyday people a full picture of what Musk is really talking about all the time regarding the pace of AI learning and how that leads to doom scenarios.
If anything, is Tesla lowering expectations for AI’s future? If a Tesla is the first “robot” people see, and then they see years of functionality that’s sub-par to an attentive human at the wheel before seeing the full promise of the Tesla Network, what picture is being painted? Then, what about the wake of uncertainty it will leave behind?
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In the interview, Musk described our minds as essentially a monkey brain with a computer trying to make the monkey brain’s primitive urges happy all the time. Once we start letting computers take over what little functions the monkey brain enjoyed or needed to keep in check (driving, painting, laboring, etc.), how is the AI eventually going to decide to deal with what it will just see as…the monkeys? Right now, we’re seeing robot cars driving into curbs and highway dividers, making us feel pretty superior to them despite the fact that humans do this much more frequently. What happens if the car one day decides to do that on purpose because its calculations factor out that humans need to exist?
Okay, I know I’m getting a touch ridiculous here, but it just brings me back to Fridman’s original question about whether Tesla carries the burden of educating the public on these matters with their push for self-driving. Perhaps if they were just focused on moving the world to sustainable energy and production, their driver-assist features would be just as Musk describes them – a convenience or value-added feature. After all, most other self-driving companies and auto manufacturers working on self-driving just have the customer in mind, not so much a robot overlord future.
But that’s not the future Musk is working towards. He’s both warning us about the future of AI while actively developing our defense against it. Should his car company then play a big role in acclimating and teaching people about what AI will really be able to do beyond getting them to work and back? Hosting 3-4 hour long “Investor Day” presentations are part of this educational effort, I suppose, but 99% (or more) of the general public is not going to be interested or even able to understand what Tesla’s genius developers are talking about, much less understand how it might apply to their lives beyond their cars one day.
I don’t really know what Tesla’s teaching could or would or should look like, but it’s an interesting question given the acceleration the company is making in bringing AI into our lives on a scale much bigger than harvesting our data to sell us ads.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
Firmware
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla’s Summer Update lets owners join Google Meet, Teams, and Discord calls via cabin camera.
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, which just began rolling out to customer vehicles, now links the built-in web browser with the in-cabin camera feed and microphone input, thereby letting owners join video calls on nearly any browser-based service instead of just Zoom.
The change appears in Tesla’s own release notes for software version 2026.26 under “Web Browser,” which states that the vehicle can now use its interior camera and cabin microphone when a website requests access, with permission granted the same way a desktop browser handles it. As NotATeslaApp notes, this feature opens the door to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and other webcam-enabled sites to activate the in-car cabin-facing camera. The feed automatically crops and zooms to center the driver in frame.
Tesla has offered in-car video calling before, but only through a dedicated Zoom app that launched at the end of 2022, a stripped-down browser preloaded with Zoom’s own web client and gated behind Premium Connectivity. Opening the full browser to any camera-requesting site removes that walled garden. Elon Musk first called video conferencing “definitely a future feature” back in 2020, when the pandemic pushed remote meetings into daily life, so this update effectively finishes something Tesla has been promising for six years.
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
The feature keeps the same restrictions that applied to Zoom on Tesla vehicles. It only works while the car is parked; shifting into Drive disables the camera feed, according to the release notes. It is also limited to vehicles running Tesla’s AMD Ryzen infotainment hardware, meaning older Intel-based Model S and Model X units, along with early Model 3 and Model Y builds, don’t get it.
Turning the browser into a general entry point for the in-cabin camera, rather than routing everything through one local app, widens the number of third-party sites that can ask for access, even though Tesla’s permission prompt.
With the Summer update only days into its rollout, be sure to stay with us on TikTok and X to see the latest video demonstrations.
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