“I was walking on the street about 10:30 at night
A lot of people go to bed around here at 10:30 at night
And, well, I was walking along when suddenly
These jocks in this bright blue pickup drove up
It had KC lights, tractor tires, everything but the CB
It was a life-size Hot Wheels car for some dumb rich kid, right”
Amongst the many jobs I can see being replaced by AI almost overnight is one of the coolest in the world: working for Mattel as a designer dreaming up fantasy Hot Wheels! Those of us who grew up with and love 1:64 diecasts are probably familiar with names like Larry Wood, Ira Gifford, and “founding father” Harry Bentley Bradley, as well as some of the newer guys like Phil Riehlman and Ryu Asada, but even if you don’t know their names, you know their work! One has to think, though, that there won’t be much of a job market for guys like this in the future now that anyone with a Mattel employee badge can dial up any of 4 or 5 dozen AI’s on their smartphone browser and ask for a cool car design! There’s a little more to it than that, of course: the dies have to be made, but hey, that’s all done by computer these days as well, and has been for a long time, so, yep: the 80/20 world of the future has arrived! The only question the folks at Mattel – and everywhere else – should be asking themselves is: who’s going to buy Hot Wheels when no one has a job?
But hey, the capital crowd will figure that out later, right? The rest of us are just along for the ride, so let’s take a look at what Skynet came up with when I told it I wanted to see some of the newer Hot Wheels “fantasy rides” at 1:1! What would it look like, I wondered, if a bunch of them showed up at Drag City to show off in the mid-day sun on a summer race day?
I could have asked for some classics like the “Twin Mill” or the “Splittin’ Image” but even though those are classics they are little “old hat” these days, don’t you think? I wanted to see some impressions of the some of the newer wild things rendered as if they were real. And I got a few, but here’s what’s really interesting: in at least half the cases, the AI misfired despite being given reference photos and produced images that looked very little like the actual castings, but in some of those cases, what the AI did produce was still very cool, and in a couple instance what I got was actually cooler than the – er – “real thing!”
So, yeah…if I were one of those people who had managed to score that dream job of being a designer for Mattel, I might be a little worried right now. And here’s why!
One of the most interesting Hot Wheels designs of the past couple of decades IMHO is the “Dodge XP-02,” interesting in part because it uses the company name of a real car and yet it isn’t a real car. I’ve done some digging, but I can find no record of Chrysler Corporation (or what was Chrysler Corporation before that worthless European investment firm Stellantis took it over and ruined it) ever producing anything like this, even on paper. So that’s something I don’t get, but, anyway: but when I asked an AI to render it as a real car, it misfired in a way that produced a couple of totally new designs that are themselves extremely cool. Here was the first effort, and lemmetellya: this may not be a Hot Wheels fantasy casting, but it sure as hell should be!!!
A second attempt at rendering the same car again produced a misfire that’s still really cool, like a modern Audi R8 or Lamborghini with a bubble-shaped glass area:
Not sure of the identity of the sinister looking hooded figure standing behind both these cars…perhaps a humanoid representative of the AI, a-la Mr. Smith from The Matrix?
Well obviously, one could go on like this for hours or days, and thanks to the recent Hot Wheels “Legends Tour” making its way around the world, many people are! Right now you can find much cooler renders than these made with more powerful (read: more expensive) AI’s than your bumble blogger’s meagre resources have access too, but I’m still pretty floored by these images, as it helps with the notion that in a “perfect world” these cars would be real! So, are y’all ready to climb into your amniotic fluid pod and plug those wires into your neck and head to the track in that perfect world? We may be irrelevant to the future, but there’s a perfect world waiting for us just around the corner! Gotta be some comfort in that, eh?
Maybe I just have a “Bad Ratitude” about everyone being replaced by computers….so c’mon ever’body, pick a favorite Hot Wheels, grab your li’l device, and try it out! You, too, can now be a Hot Wheels designer!
