The Monkey on the Pedestal – Why Traditional Car Makers are Focusing so much on the Wrong Technologies

If the press releases and breathless media coverage are to be believed, traditional car manufacturers such as Mercedes, BMW and VW once again seem to be at the forefront of technological development. Turquoise lights, an automatic parking function that works in just one parking garage worldwide or an automated lane-keeping assistant in traffic jams are being touted as highly innovative and pioneering. Pride is written all over the faces of the patriots, because Tesla or the Chinese “are unable to do all that“. This is the tenor with which they want to cleanse themselves of the embarrassment that the wave of Chinese, Korean or American electric car manufacturers are inflicting on traditional car manufacturers.

But what are these turquoise lights actually good for? Where do you want to be dropped off at the airport? In the garage (as required by Mercedes’ parking function) or rather at the terminal? And why should I spend money on a lane departure warning system?

Why are they doing this? It’s easy to explain: these features are incremental improvements to technology you already have. Instead of embarking on developing a new technology that would be better suited to solving a major challenge, but at the same time brings with it a high degree of uncertainty and whose success is not guaranteed, it seems easier to further develop existing solutions that allow you to stay on the supposedly safe side while demonstrating progress. However, “faking progress” would be the better phrase here, because simply developing an existing technology incrementally can make it impossible to solve the challenge.

It’s like the question “How do we get to the moon?” Do we simply build a higher and higher ladder or a rocket? The former solution is the application and further development of an existing solution. And it gives us the illusion of continuous progress. It brings us ever closer to the moon. But we know that you can’t get to the moon with a ladder. A new solution is needed. But initially we don’t know whether the rockets we have devised can even meet this challenge. We also don’t know how long it will take and what other problems will arise. We might as well jump higher and higher so that we learn to fly.

The conclusion in unfortunately all too many cases is: you build the ladder. And at the same time you smile at the madmen who are trying to build the rocket. Up to the point where the rocket builders are successful and you yourself have failed. Then they retreat with the bonuses they’ve received for years for faking progress and defiantly claim “We didn’t do anything wrong and we still failed.” And they feel this is unfair.

Astro Teller, head of Google’s Moonshot department, published a blog about this a few years ago entitled Tackle the monkey first. In the article, he tells the story of an acquaintance who wanted to work in France to improve her French. When she actually received an offer to work in a French company surrounded by French speakers, she turned it down. She wanted to learn enough French before accepting such an offer and planned to improve her French by listening to French podcasts.

Teller just shook his head, because where is the quickest way to learn French? By being forced to speak French all the time. And you don’t do that by listening to French podcasts, but by practicing French yourself. Teller compared it to erecting a monkey statue on a pedestal. Do you start with the pedestal first or do you begin by focusing on the monkey statue? The answer is clear: the pedestal is not the goal and should not be the focus at all. The monkey is the be-all and end-all. The focus should be on creating the monkey statue. The pedestal is secondary and only becomes important when the monkey statue is finished.

But one thing is clear: working on the monkey statue is much more difficult than working on the pedestal. Being surrounded by French speakers and having to speak French all the time is hard. It’s much easier to passively listen to a French podcast.

So why are traditional manufacturers developing turquoise lights, an unnecessary parking function for a single garage or a lane-keeping-in-congestion assistant? They focus on the platform, not the monkey. They build the ladder, not the rocket. They jump higher and higher, not the airplane.

All of this fits perfectly into their traditional processes, their reward and bonus structures. This means that no one ever does anything wrong, and hardly anyone can be punished when they inevitably fail. After all, everyone has done everything right. And I didn’t create that sentence out of thin air. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop complained at a press conference in 2016 when Microsoft acquired Nokia:

We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow we lost.

It’s easy to laugh at Tesla’s FSD beta today, to feel vindicated that Cruise got into trouble with the authorities after an accident (through no fault of his own), that Waymo is moving so slowly after many years of developing self-driving technology. But it’s not easy to tackle the monkey. Installing a turquoise light is just the pedestal. And that’s exactly why the pedestal builders won’t make it. It’s already over for them, and they don’t know it. They didn’t do anything wrong.

Speaking of monkeys: I’ve written a “monkey book”, actually one about artificial intelligence. Two, to be precise. The monkey book was published in 2020, and the book entitled “Creative Intelligence” just four weeks ago. If you want to know more about ‘monkey statues’, i.e. the people who develop the latest technologies and don’t focus on pedestals, then I would like to recommend these two books to you.

Thank you Tobias for pointing me to Astro Teller’s blog.

This article was also published in German.