Optimus Crime

Bumblebee, Ratchet, Ironhide and Optimus Prime are the Autobot members I remember off the top off my head from the Transformers cartoons and live action movies. Will we, as a sentient species, live to see such advanced robotics? Elon Musk estimates that it'll be a mere three to five years before we can buy our own domestic robot assistant.

If Elon makes a promise, we can be sure he'll deliver. Right? I do hope you got the sarcasm there, for we know that none of his promises or boasts ever become reality. Musk is the king of vapid promises, inflated stocks and false claims. Many people still believe to this day that he is the creator of PayPal and Tesla. And Tesla is, whichever way you look at it, grossly overvalued. But we're here to talk robots now, and Elon Musk introduced his, called "Optimus", at this year's A.I. day. Last year he teased what the robot would look like by hiring a person in a bot suit doing a silly dance on stage. This year he unveiled the first "working" prototype.

What a let-down it was. I'm not going to say too much here and just invite you to watch the linked videos; moving pictures say so much more than words... I'll just say that Optimus looked like he could trip and fall down at any moment, moved with the blinding speed of a 110 year old and showed no indication of being aware of its surroundings at any time. Sure, Elon also showed some pre-recorded material of Optimus doing some light tasks, like watering a plant or carrying a box, but that's all (probably) with remote control and heavily edited, as shown in the second video; be sure to watch that one!

Here are some reactions to this reveal:

Taking to Twitter, tech specialists began criticizing Tesla for its disappointing reveal. One of them, Cynthia Yeung, tweeted: ‘None of this is cutting edge. Hire some PhDs and go to some robotics conferences @Tesla. Hive account@iros2022 is coming up in a few weeks!’ Meanwhile, AI researcher Filip Piekniewski posted: ‘This Tesla AI Day is next level cringeworthy. Complete and utter scam. Who on earth believes this bullshit anymore?’
_{source: designboom}

For once, I fully agree with Elon when he points out what robots could do and mean for humanity:

In his most starry-eyed moment, he said robots could lead to "a future of abundance, a future where there is no poverty, where people can have whatever you want in terms of products and services. It really is a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it."
_{source: CNET}

On another occasion he said that, if we imagine a world devoid of labor-shortage, he doesn't even know what it would mean to speak of an economy. I agree with all of that because yes, we are technologically capable of creating a Utopia. But not with people like Elon at the helm. As long as the means of production, among which are these robots, are privately owned by his small capitalist class, the only thing we have to look forward to is ever bigger social and economic divides in our already hopelessly fragmented societies. And all Musk has said and done so far indicates he doesn't want to change anything about the system that has served him so well. But there's another reason why it's unfortunate to have Musk pioneer these new technological avenues.

He's a liar and a megalomaniac who makes frivolous promises and whose experiments are bound to fail. Have failed even. It's not a coincidence we hear nothing about SolarCity or the Hyperloop anymore; these are just two of his failed experiments that had been debunked thoroughly before they even started, and NeuraLink (his computer-brain interface chip) and Optimus are two new failures in the making. Elon's entire spiel is to create hype, and then forget about it. Much of the hype is meant to inflate stock prices, and the mainstream media is complicit as they seem to always fall for his outlandishly unrealistic claims.

I mean, who could take seriously his plan to take the traffic problem underground by digging endless tunnels? But he convinced investors and even the state of California, ruining their plans for a high-speed train. Who still believes he'll colonize Mars within our lifetime? And who believes we'll be able to buy our own C-3PO or R2D2 or Optimus within 5 years? If you do, you're the perfect candidate to watch the included videos. My fear is that when these projects become the failures they're bound to become under Elon's guidance, there's a chance that it'll be a while before someone else embarks on such an adventure. The same goes for his plans for Mars. That would be such a set-back for humanity...

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