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This is just an excerpt from The Ezra Levant Show. To see new, ad-free episodes, which air Monday - Friday @ 8 p.m. ET | 6 p.m. MT, become a subscriber to RebelNews+. This episode originally aired on October 11, 2024.

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Did you see Elon Musk's announcements this week through his company Tesla? Some were interesting but not shocking. For example, he showed what a driverless taxi could look like Tesla style. 

Elon Musk also mused about what our world would look like if we didn't have cars that needed to be parked in parking lots but rather if it was all just autonomous vehicles whizzing around that you just ordered on demand. So what would a post-private ownership of vehicles look like? He said it would basically turn parking lots into parks.

Now I take Ubers a lot, they're very convenient especially when I'm travelling or to avoid the hassle of parking downtown. Sometimes the cost of taking an Uber to an event is less than the cost of driving and paying for parking in a big city like Toronto or New York. But I also really love my actual car. It's sort of beat up now, it's pretty old.

But, it's the car that's parked on my driveway, the car that I don't need an app to use, the car that I can drive whenever and wherever and however I want and no one else is involved. No tech company, no third party, no driver or artificial intelligence driver.

To me, a car is an essential part of being a free person. It's one of the defining spirits of America and Canada too, as opposed to more European, African or Asian ways. How much freedom there is on the open road? I mean, how many hundreds of songs have been written about driving on the highway and the freedom you feel?

Tesla and these autonomous vehicles are part of huge technology companies that are amongst the most regulated companies in the world. And they're heavily regulated for political purposes, as you know. YouTube punished us at Rebel News for having videos that were too pro-Trump, so they demonetized us. They're the people who punished us for not supporting COVID lockdown policies, that was literally part of their community guidelines.

If you didn't obey your public health officer's politics, you would be shut down. So the company that interfered with your freedom of expression for political reasons, surely won't hesitate to interfere with your freedom of movement for the same reasons, right? 

Waymo and Uber have announced that they're teaming up. So my point is, would I have been able to go to, say an anti-COVID lockdown, anti-COVID mandate protest, if Waymo had been operating in Canada back in February 2022, would they have let me go to the trucker convoy? Would an autonomous vehicle have taken me to the trucker convoy?

I like Elon Musk a lot, but Teslas are at the mercy of their software and hardware. Even if Elon Musk personally opposed some sort of lockdown, could he really resist a government order to identify any cars participating in a future trucker convoy? How about shutting them off if they got too close to such a political event?

Half of all the Teslas in the world are in China. Do you doubt they want that power over their people? Do you think that our politicians lack the
will to regulate where you can go? They're already doing it in a sloppy way through 15-minute cities, that's with spy cameras and barriers, it would be so much easier for them just to program the 15-minute cities into an autonomous vehicle, don't you think?

I mean, do you think the tech companies lack the ability to do this to you? Do you think they ever resist what the regimes tell them to do? I'm sure you'd be fine 99% of the time, maybe 99.9 % of the time, but it's that last time that counts, isn't it?

So Elon Musk rolled out his autonomous vehicles, but that wasn't really that shocking. What was shocking was that Elon Musk rolled out humanoid robots that he says you'll soon be able to buy for your household. He says they'll not just be great for chores, but they'll also be your friend.

They're not selling these robots yet. But I've seen videos of some celebrities saying they're going to get one soon. Like the cool Cybertruck, I'm sure that fancy people and opinion leaders will be able to get these Android-style humanoid robots very quickly. Maybe we'll learn
then what the terms of service will say, but it's hard to imagine they'll be much different than Tesla's terms for their cars, which are essentially robots too when you think about them. 

Imagine a robot in your house never sleeping, always listening, always watching, never forgetting anything, uploading it all to the cloud so corporate can go through it at their sole discretion. How do you feel about that? I'm sure some people will love it. In many homes, people already have Alexa or other devices that control systems in their house based on voice activation. They're listening all the time, those little devices. They have to know when they're being ordered to do something.

It's just now the robots don't look like a little disk. They look like real people. You can see the benefits, of course. I mean, why not have some help with household chores? We had the Roomba that did one thing, but why not have a humanoid robot to do that? And really, why not mow the lawn and why not paint the house and maybe do some household repair work? Sure. Have them go up on the roof to clean up the
leaves from the eavesdrop so you don't have to risk it. Who would object to that?

Well, I suppose a lot of Landscapers and gardeners will have to find something new to do to earn a living, and a lot of taxi drivers and truck drivers will soon be unemployed because of these autonomous vehicles too.

Right now, the truth is that notwithstanding any other laws, a robot will do whatever big government orders it to do because that's what the terms of service say. The terms of service are really a code of conduct for robots. The terms of service say: 'You have all these rights to your robot, to your Tesla, to your Android, unless there's a matter of public safety, which we, in our sole discretion, will define.'

You know, I would get a kick out of a robot helping me fix a few things around the house, and change some light bulbs. I like mowing the lawn sometimes, but I'd probably prefer having a robot do it, things like that. It would be good to have a security system that was prowling around, although he'd probably have to fight against robot intruders come to think of it.

But for me, the thing I would be most worried about is having every word, every action, every facial expression, every journey, every movement I made, even in my own home, in my own car, just recorded and shared with big tech and shared with big government.

And if I did something serious, well then they would intervene in whatever way they wanted. It's already bad enough to live with my cell phone spying on us, don't you think?