Elon Musk’s vision of “amazing abundance” imagines a world in which goods and services become plentiful and inexpensive, thanks to the unfolding technological revolution. The idea sounds fanciful, but it has a long lineage. Civilisations have long dreamt of magical sources of plenty — the Akshay Patra of Indian mythology, the cornucopia of the ancient Greeks. Karl Marx, too, believed that advancing productive forces could eventually liberate humanity from drudgery, but the obstacle was in the exploitative structure of social relations.

Musk’s bet is narrower than Marx’s. He is convinced that the tech revolution at hand could produce societies of “universal high income”. Whether this seductive vision is real or not, the tech transformation is here and is called “embodied intelligence” or “physical AI”.

Digital AI generates answers to questions and is moving towards the simulation of reality, but it remains locked inside your computer. “Embodied intelligence” — robots, often built in vaguely human form and known as humanoids, that can sense their surroundings, make decisions, and use mechanical limbs to act on them — promises to step into the factory, the hospital ward, and the battlefield. Musk’s bet is that such humanoid robots could become the most consequential product ever made, doing for production what the computer did for information.

This is not fantastical futurism. Industrial robots have populated factories for decades. The new ambition is to make them adaptable enough, by........

© Indian Express