Talent borrows, genius steals

 

TESLA---the car company---was going through a rough spell...(market-wise, we mean)...but now Glenn, our friend, sends this...

...and the sun shines again on the Tesla stock price.

Hold on, didn't we promise a third installment of our new comedy, about Dolly, the new robot? And, yes, coincidences never happen (classical deterministic mechanics), and so we have a line about Elon Musk in this comedy. Here it is (Steve (founder of a planetary maker of robots), and Eliza (his former lover) in conversation):

ELIZA (TURNING TO STEVE:) ...Capitalism brought you here, Steve.

STEVE: Capitalism? The secret tube for billionaires brought me here, Elon Musk's vacuum tube under the Atlantic with magnetic levitation trains running at twelve times the speed of sound. I caught the last one.

ELIZA: The DEMISE of capitalism brought you here, I mean...but that's not all... 

...(sorry to interrupt)..."Demise of capitalism", you wonder? Yes, because that's what Dolly, the the new, automatic wunderkind brought about, in all its innocence, and here's the corresponding fragment from the play (Dolly served as a collateral for a loan to Eliza from the Shark-Blue Bank, but Eliza defaulted on the loan, so the collateral has been delivered to the bank). Triple-X is the helper of the bailiff.

DOLLY

  Well, the honorable bailiffs tried to dump me on the sharks of the Skye-Blue Bank.

TRIPLE-X

  Shark-Blue Bank.

DOLLY

  I thought...let's annoy the bankers beyond repair so that they'll send me back to the doctor. I don't want to work for a bank, you see. I'm a communist at heart...

What is this --- Carla, Arfai, MOMA, Robots, TESLA, Dolly

This looks like a famous exhibition piece in the garden of a museum, doesn't it? The Getty Museum in LA, for example, or the MET cloisters in New York City, or the MOMA.

MOMA? Yes, the Museum of Modern Art, also located in New York City. 

Hold on, the MOMA doesn't have a garden. But our house here in Alcobaça, PT has one:

And the hands themselves, then? Well, they are a good-bye present from our neighbor Carla Moreira.

Carla in front of her offices

She sold her house next door and moved to an apartment atop her ceramics factory nearby, where these hands are made. 

One day, the hands will be famous, since Arfai, Carla's company, is a prime maker of high-end ceramics, and you must absolutely have a look at Arfai's web site.

Why, then, do we talk about the MOMA?

Because we wrote a play, a comedy about robots, in which the MOMA plays a role. And yesterday was TESLA's AI-day, which was also about robots, in pacticular about their new inhouse robot Optimus.  

It's practically finished, our play, and here is a fragment:

(Context: Robert was built long ago by Steve as a protoype of his future line of household robots and given to his then-girlfriend Eliza as a parting gift with the promise to return 25 years later with the latest version of said household robots. Today is the day, and the name of this latest version is Dolly. Dolly is urgently needed because Robert--technologically outdated--will no longer supported/updated. Robert knows that he'll soon be redundant, and he has just complained that he'll be ending his existence in a garbage container. One more thing: Dolly is still wrapped up in a garish gift box. Here goes:)

DOLLY (TO ROBERT)

  You're Generation One. You've been discontinued. You're no longer supported.

ROBERT

  I know, I'm on my way out.

DOLLY

  Before you go, please get me out of here.

ROBERT

  Why do you want to get out? Are you afraid in the dark?

DOLLY

  I explained this 10 minutes and 11 seconds ago.