Optimus: Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
Hernán Sánchez: After his open rejection of Artificial Intelligence from the open letter published at the beginning of March of this year, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, presented his new version of Optimus, a robot controlled with artificial intelligence.
This "humanoid robot" is designed to "facilitate the transportation of parts and improve the production process in the company's production facilities," according to Musk. Just over 10 months ago, Optimus was just an idea that barely existed in projects and papers. In its first presentation, the automaton did not even walk, and last October it was shown as a slow and clumsy robot. Optimus: Tesla's new humanoid robot that seeks to become the first to be sold massively
Today, it has movements very similar to those of humans and can perform precision tasks, such as operating a drill or grasping small and fragile objects. The company recently published a video in which the robot can be seen "making" another Optimus. The goal, they said, is "to create a robot capable of performing labor tasks in Tesla's own factories to eventually be able to commercialize it at a cost of less than $20,000 for home use."
The increasing investment in robotics and Artificial Intelligence by large technology companies is an undeniable reality, despite the fact that the same actors are asking to stop their development
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The combination of these elements brings about a leap in production on an ever-larger scale, based on the possibility that a robot has some type of artificial intelligence (or combinations thereof) integrated into its software, and can make decisions based on from previous databases and information and/or "knowledge" that it acquires as it is put into operation.
Tesla Optimus is the robot that wants to end poverty - soloautos.mxUnlike that type of robotics that does not have built-in AI and that was already used (such as the robotic arms that exist in various factories around the world), these new models can learn automatically and perfect the execution of the tasks for which they have been created, even being able to start performing new functions.
Tesla's numbers, in this case, have been increasing in productive terms. According to official company data, 3,870,340 Tesla models have been built in the last five years (including the first quarter of 2023), of which almost 1,400,000 were produced in 2022 alone.
The difference between the number of Tesla cars (“3/Y” and “X/S”) produced during 2021 and 2022 was more than 400,000 examples; the same figure that the company already produced in the first quarter of the current year. The company's sales data also show this reality, which reflects a growing increase in its production.
Break the mirror, fade the reflections
Faced with a chaotic reality where the informational bombardment of technological advances is overwhelming, it is necessary to understand what happens from the point of view of the subaltern classes, for whom the conditions for the reproduction of life worsen, while time is made available to the capital to produce knowledge, without question, beyond the working day as we know it.
Technological development has been presented in multiple debates as a threat to the human race, in the construction of a fatalistic discourse that envisions a future in which work will disappear. But we must be clear on this: everything built, absolutely everything created in this new financial-digital phase of the economic system is the product of live labor, of the "wisdom of the majority" or "general intellect", in the words of Carlos Marx. .Mexico and the challenges of science and technology in the face of the pandemic
Within the framework of the fourth industrial revolution, connectivity on a planetary scale has allowed the formation of a global worker, an interconnected unit that, in its action on a series of instruments (devices), produces information from which average parameters are built. global.
These parameters of human action on the instruments -in short, work-, are absorbed by the companies that today dispute global governance and that are personified in a New Financial and Technological Aristocracy, which allows them to update and/or improve each time with greater speed the instruments that have been socialized and, in this way, increase competitiveness, and accumulate. They make more and more surplus value.
We are facing what Marx called the real subsumption of labor in capital:
“…with the development of the real subsumption of labor in capital or the specifically capitalist mode of production, it is not the individual worker but more and more a socially combined labor capacity that becomes the real agent of the labor process in its whole” (K. Marx, unpublished chapter VI).
Specifically, by way of example, if Tesla increases his productivity, it is not because Optimus is a worker who "learns and thinks for himself", but because the machine has been trained with the knowledge and work of scientists, engineers, technicians, workers etc It is our bodies and minds, it is our intelligence that, subsumed into this system, increases the productivity of work... and the profits of a few.
Robot generations, robotics engineering evolution, ai robot technology and humanoid computer generation cartoon | Premium Vector This is where the mirror breaks and the reflections fade. It is humanity that has developed collective knowledge, from work, which allowed the development of science and technology. Shouldn't technology then be made available to humanity, rather than the profits of a handful of companies?
Technology as a tool in a process that leads to greater liberation, and not, on the contrary, to greater degrees of slavery, implies fighting to put the human race at the center of development.
If we fail to reverse the logic, once again the economic powers concentrated in their eagerness to win the war for the appropriation of wealth will manage to stabilize after the crisis produced by this phase change and will leave behind a world environmentally devastated and a starving humanity.
The alternative for the great majorities is to weave social networks that produce power to wage the final battle against the truly useless class, which lives off those who work. Stop being an instrument of the machine so that it becomes an instrument of humanity and recover what belongs to us. That is the future that we must propose and fight to conquer it.
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