2035: When Your Car Dumps the Steering Wheel and Your Dishwasher Gets Jealous

Meet Ashok—the Quiet VP Who Broke the Internet

The dude was happy tinkering with line-following robots in college, ditched a “safe” government gig everyone in his neighborhood would’ve killed for, and somehow wound up running the brains inside every self-driving Tesla. Musk sent a single tweet of praise and suddenly every tech nerd from Chennai to Cupertino was Googling “Who is Ashok Elluswamy?”

You get the sense he’d rather be soldering sensors than flexing on LinkedIn, but sit him down with a mic and he drops downright sci-fi predictions with a straight face. Let’s unpack a few.

Self-Driving by Default (Steering Wheels = Rotary Phones)

Ashok’s confidence level? Off the charts. By 2035, every new car rolls out of the factory fully driverless. No steering wheel needed; old-school manuals become weekend-project antiques for hipsters who collect vinyl and Polaroids. “All cars manufactured will be self-driving,” he flat-out says .

Translation: You’ll hop in, thumb your destination on your phone, hit Start Trip, and watch the seat massage your stress away while the car negotiates four-way stops, swerves around rogue traffic cones, and merges smoother than melted butter . Meanwhile, Level-5 autonomy means you nap, binge-watch, or actually talk to your kids instead of practicing defensive swearing on I-75.

Enter the Humanoids (Optimus Was Just the Trailer)

Cars are only Act I. Act II? Full-blown humanoid robots roaming factory floors and folding your laundry back home. Hands, legs, cameras, voice chat—basically the Chitti android from Indian cinema, minus the melodramatic soundtrack .

Ashok’s matter-of-fact certainty here is hilarious: “Robots will have hands and legs. They can do whatever you tell them. And you can interact with it in natural language.”

So your Roomba’s about to feel seriously under-qualified.

School’s Out, AI’s In

Remember staring at the ceiling while your teacher re-explained algebra you already nailed? Ashok sees that whole model nuked from orbit. Personalized AI tutors for every kid, 2-3× faster learning, no one left behind because the “smart board” moved on too soon .

Sure, your eighth-grader might still claim the dog ate the homework, but the dog will be a Boston Dynamics knock-off, and the AI tutor will have backup copies in the cloud.

Abundance: Capitalism on Easy Mode

Biggest flex of the interview: a future where money’s kinda optional. Once solar gobbles up free energy and robots supply the muscle and the brain, why are we still clocking in just to survive? Ashok calls it “trending toward abundance.”

Maybe not by 2035—he gives it 50 years—but the trajectory’s set. Work because you want to create, not because the mortgage is breathing down your neck. Sounds utopian. Also sounds like half of Twitter will cry socialism. Buckle up.

But Wait, AI Panic?

Is all this hype just another tech bubble waiting to pop? He shrugs. Progress isn’t linear; it surges, stalls, then surges harder. Since GPUs got hijacked from Fortnite duty to deep-learning duty, the curve’s only bending upward .

Yes, accidents happen. Yes, Waymo’s lidar rigs still cost more than your first house. But Tesla’s betting pure-vision networks scale cheaper, faster, farther. If they nail it, the cost of hailing a robo-cab crashes, traffic explodes, and parking garages turn into pickleball courts. Trade-offs, baby.

So Where Do We Fit In?

Look, you can cling to your leather-wrapped steering wheel like it’s a blankie—or you can start planning for a world where the car drives, the robot cooks, and your biggest decision is which indie film you’ll direct on your laptop using text-to-video prompts .

The winners? Folks who learn to command the machines. Not code monkeys banging out for-loops—think creative directors wielding AI like a lightsaber. Ashok’s words: “It will give more power to the individual.”

So maybe spend less time doom-scrolling and more time figuring out what ridiculous, one-person empire you’d build if the bots handled the grunt work.

Final Sip

Ashok isn’t selling snake oil. He’s the quietly lethal engineer already shipping pieces of this future while the rest of us tweet hot takes. Could he be off by a decade? Sure. But remember: Blockbuster laughed at Netflix. Nokia laughed at the iPhone. And somewhere tonight a steering wheel is laughing at its own funeral.

See you in 2035—no hands on the wheel, playlist blasting, robot butler saving you the last donut.