This is an old obscure story but, with all the talk lately about robots manufactured by and for militant racists (e.g. Tesla), I thought it would be worth revisiting.

Disney made a robotic President Lincoln in 1964, which lectured audiences for dramatic effect. It since has been used as a model to train U.S. troops.

Having watched the facial animation progression from Wathel’s first efforts in 1955, thru Jack Gladish’s first Chinaman, then the 1964 Lincoln [through today]… We first implemented this sort of work in our projects for the US Marines in the Infantry Immersion Trainer at Camp Pendleton. We created a series of animatronic townspeople to populate the immersive training environment—some of them were slated to be hostile combatants.

Did I just read that a fake Lincoln was staged as a hostile combatant for Marines to train against?

Awkward.

Allegedly the justification for turning Disney’s Lincoln into enemy combatant was that animatronics were easier to build than using human actors. Does this mean no actors were willing to play Lincoln as an enemy of the Marines for some particular reason?

I mean the underlying theme of this story reminds me of…

…Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California was a hotbed of KKK activity–an open secret that was tolerated or aided by Marine Corps brass… white marine Klansmen openly distributed racist literature on the base, pasted KKK stickers on barracks doors and hid illicit weapons in their quarters…

Camp Pendleton, racist hotbed of the KKK, trained Marines with an animatronic staged as their enemy combatant… based on President Lincoln? What would President Lincoln say about that?

Were they training Marines on assassinating him? Here’s a 1977 interview of a Marine about their environment.

Q. Do you think the Klan has been rooted out of Pendleton?

A. Definitely not. Definitely no. It’s still here and they’re still organizing here. They might have calmed down a little bit; kept their stuff under cover a little bit more, but as far as being rooted out–no.

Lincoln blithely portrayed as the basis for enemy combatants seems to fit a sad narrative. Misuse of technology easily can poison human U.S. troops against democracy.

Robots manufactured by and for militant racists is a fascinating chapter of disinformation tools in American history, no?

Absolutely scathing analysis is coming from Forbes, alleging Tesla robotics are just a clumsy fraud.

…while it’s cool to see a company like Tesla tinkering with robotics, it seems like we still have a long ways to go before we’re sharing our homes with robot servants—a promise of the future we’ve been waiting on for over a century. Optimus doesn’t appear have capabilities beyond anything we could do in 1964…

Just one century? That sounds like the original mechanical Turk story from the 1700s, if we really want to go back in time. And three centuries of such experience is why wise Germans tend to call Tesla products today “Getürked” (fraud).

Consider now how little has changed since the 1700s, in terms of charlatans and con-artists.

Fun fact: Driverless cars — road robots — run the same long timeline as other modern robots. They all basically are post-WWII science fiction.

Heavily promoted in the 1960s as our inevitable future, the buzz almost entirely died out by the 1970s (not least of all because the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam War destroyed trust in automation systems).

This is not to say hard problems can’t be solved. Rather that the people actually solving hard problems will fail wherever charlatans roam unregulated, because fraud destroys markets.

Attention-obsessed charlatans tend to burn so brightly they suck all the oxygen out of innovation, undermining authentic engineers as a perceived threat to false status.

Without fraud there would be no Tesla.