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optopixel · 2 years ago

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How Vision Inspection Enhances Auto Industry in Smart Manufacturing

The automotive industry is undergoing a major transformation. India has witnessed a massive change and growth in this segment. The Indian auto parts industry is witnessing a massive growth, it marked a 23% growth in 2023 and is contributing 2.3% to India’s GDP.

Everything from smart manufacturing to sustainable practices will strongly impact how the automotive industry will function in the future. One of the key technologies that is pivotal in redefining the auto industry’s efficiency is the vision inspection system.

Stringent quality practices are a must for automotive part manufacturers. The visual inspection system has become integral for smart manufacturing processes. It enables the manufacturer to achieve unparalleled reliability, efficiency and productivity. This blog will unfold the details of how a vision inspection system can enhance the automotive industry.

What is a Vision Inspection System?

Before delving deeper into how vision inspection systems can enhance smart manufacturing processes, let’s examine what makes this technology crucial for the automotive sector. Vision Inspection System, or Machine Vision, is a technology that uses cameras and image processing software to inspect and measure objects in real-time.

It works on similar principles as the human visual system but with better efficiency and precision. It helps identify defects, inconsistencies, or deviations from the desired specifications. One of the unique propositions of this technology is that it is highly versatile and is not just limited to the automotive industry. There are several other applications of the same.

Implementing Vision Inspection System Ensures:

Quality products

Increased production efficiency

It helps in reducing the cost

Compliance with the safety standards

Types Of Vision Inspection Systems Used In the Auto Industry

1. Laser Marking Inspection

This helps mark identification codes, logos, and labels on automotive components. It ensures accuracy by verifying its position and quality.

2. Barcode Scanning

Another type includes the scanning of barcodes. It is used for tracking and tracing of the automotive parts. Also, it ensures effective inventory management and reduces the probability of errors.

3. Pattern Matching Inspection

As the name indicates, this method identifies specific patterns and shapes of the automotive components. It is integral for the quality control and ensures that each component fits perfectly. This ensures seamless functioning of the manufacturing process.

4. Bearing Inspection

Bearings are critical components in vehicles; their integrity is essential for safety and performance. Vision Inspection Systems can detect even minor defects in bearings, such as cracks or irregularities, ensuring that only high-quality components make it into the assembly line.

How Vision Inspection Enhances Auto Industry in Smart Manufacturing

1. Improved Quality Control and Defect Detection

One of the key reasons companies rely on vision inspection system is because it ensures precise quality control. The vision inspection system canteen even the minutest of errors or flaws otherwise invisible to the human eye. Identifying the defence early in manufacturing can help overcome the issues and reduce the probability of faulty products. This also helps in maintaining the brand quality and ensures better customer satisfaction.

2. Enhanced Efficiency and Production Speed

With the growing demand in the automotive sector, automotive companies are always on their toes to address these demands. With modern technologies like vision inspection systems, companies can ensure real-time inspection. With effective quality control, they can overcome the delay of manual quality checks and also reduce the labour cost. This overall increases productivity and helps in maintaining consistency. This further increases the product efficiency.

3. Real-time Monitoring and Data Analysis

In the case of smart manufacturing, the company heavily relies on the data. This data will give them an analysis of the production process, allowing the manufacturers to gain valuable insight. By analysing the data generated during the inspection process, the companies can identify trends, pinpoint areas of improvement and make data-driven decisions, which can help gain a competitive edge.

4. Cost Reduction and Resource Optimization

By reducing the occurrence of defects and minimizing rework, Vision Inspection Systems contribute to cost reduction. Additionally, the efficiency gains achieved through automation and real-time monitoring lead to resource optimization. Manufacturers can allocate their workforce and resources more effectively, making their operations leaner and more cost-efficient. This, in turn, allows for competitive pricing while maintaining profit margins.

5. Compliance with Industry Regulations

For an automotive company to gain a competitive edge, it must adhere to the quality and comply with the safety regulations. The vision inspection system makes it easier to ensure complete consistency and accuracy while inspecting the components and products. Thus, the manufacturers can demonstrate their commitment to quality standards, reducing the risk of regulatory penalties.

Trends in Vision Inspection Technology

Technological implementation is pivotal for any organisation to stay ahead of the curve. The vision inspection system can further be improvised with the integration of modern technologies like:

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

We cannot separate AI and machine learning when discussing technological revolution. Technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning drive the modern-day revolution. With these technologies, it becomes easier to analyse the trends in the past and adapt new methods that can help improve the vision inspection process. AI-powered vision systems are becoming more sophisticated and capable of handling complex inspection tasks.

Enhanced Connectivity and Industry 4.0

The vision inspection system has become crucial for automotive companies. It is an integral part of Industry 4.0 initiatives. The data exchange is playing a pivotal role in this. These systems are increasingly integrated into the broader manufacturing ecosystem, allowing seamless communication between machines, robots, and other equipment. This interconnectedness enables real-time decision-making and the optimization of the entire production process.

Miniaturization and Portability

Advancements in camera technology and miniaturization have made it possible to deploy Vision Inspection Systems in smaller, more challenging spaces. Portable vision systems can be used for on-site inspections and maintenance, enhancing efficiency and flexibility.

Conclusion

As the technology continues to evolve, its applications will transform the industry and the process. Vision inspection system has become an indispensable tool for the automotive industry. Its ability to deliver consistent quality control, enhance production efficiency and real-time insights helps the automotive company comply with the quality standards, keeping them ahead of the curve.

SOURCE: https://optopixel.com/how-vision-inspection-enhances-auto-industry-in-smart-manufacturing/

#Vision inspection System #automotive industry #smart manufacturing market #machine vision

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mi-researchreports · 2 years ago

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#machine vision systems market report #machine vision systems market growth #machine vision systems market forecast #machine vision systems market trends #machine vision systems market analysis #machine vision systems market size #machine vision systems market share

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watermelonlicker · 3 months ago

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this is not an attack but more of a please remember why we are here and to not feed into this anymore.

idgaf if they’re still together, if they broke up in 2022, 2018, 2015, 2013, whatever the hell y’all theorize. we KNOW they were/are together and that they were harshly closeted bcos of that. harry was the chosen one. the minute he walked across the stage on the x factor with his curly hair and adorable dimples and infectious personality simon foul saw dollar signs. he was not impressed by his singing. he was impressed by all he envisioned he could do to exploit harry. harry who has been painted as an older woman chasing/fetishist, cheating, womanizing, homewrecking, manipulative, narcissistic, maniacal supervillain since he was 16. “harry broke up 1d” “harry wanted to go solo”

harry was a fucking child who simply wanted to sing and formed a crush on his bandmate, who he discussed it with, who mutually felt it, and they fell in love. harry was/is in love with louis and that was/is the fucking PROBLEM. no way simon/sony was allowing their cash cow to be anything other than what they wanted. an attractive prop for the entertainment of straight women. didn’t matter if there was a legion of queer fans who supported him, didn’t matter if there are allies who would support him with louis or any man who made him happy (the narrative for solos is anyone but louis but you know what i mean). heterosexuality is supreme and that is the fucking PROBLEM. everything is to obtain this heteronormative oppressive system. it being the assumption that everyone’s straight or identifies as cis is the problem. artists want to survive which is why they hide. outting is not okay and there shouldn’t be a system in place where something like outting even exists. are straight/cis people outted? no.

we watched louis be destroyed. he was always viewed and marketed as the least profitable member. he had the least solos, his mic was turned off most of the damn time, he was widely ignored unless it was a scandal they invented even though he wrote the majority of the songs WITH LIAM. even though he was a leader in staying connected with the fandom from the beginning, even though he was/is a goddamn light. we watched him go from our hilarious sunshine boy to imaged as a hotel trashing, fivesome having, arrogant, homophobic, macho-laddy lad, jealous (yes they claimed he was jealous) when he was NONE OF THAT, and we have watched him fight back against that and claw his way out of it and ofc trauma has stuck with him so ofc he’s changed in some ways but he is also the same person. and he is smarter than he has ever been given credited for. and he has a memory of steel whether you believe his stoner brain or not. louis has always had a vision even if we don’t understand it. he has always believed in the band and us and has fought hard to finally believe in himself after they took it from him. that is a testament to his strength. IT IS THE STRENGTH OF QUEER PEOPLE TO BE RESILIENT.

WE SAW IT WITH OUR FUCKING EYES. WE SAW THE DRASTIC FUCKING CHANGES OVER THE YEARS IN REAL FUCKING TIME. and so many other queer artists have been ripped apart throughout history. so many are only outted after their death (freddie mercury).

what they put those men through as boys was/is abhorrent (including liam, zayn, & niall. the hell they went through should not be excluded. zayn faced racism, islamophobia, and was disparaged for leaving when he was DYING in front of us, liam turned to alcohol to cope while being used as the pr mouth piece, and niall withered away to the point he lost his smile) if the truth was exposed i’m sure the feds would be knocking on their door like they have been knocking on others. that’s why they’re doubling down. continuing to churn out the tired machine, and are still worried about larries in 2025. there’s a collective effort to continue to shut us up bcos there is something to hide. we need to make the effort to not be an expectation. to not be guaranteed raging fangirls for clicks. we need to be something else. the climate is shifting slowly. people are waking up slowly. people are listening slowly. we cannot move with emotion. they want to prey on it. if you’ve noticed they are writing the narrative that we are the crazies louis can’t shake. the standard did it. and now the scum is doing it again. that is our image to the gp and it hurts louis when he’s trying to attract the gp. we have to be patient. it sucks yes. i’m sick of it and i’ve only been back a month but i believe this is bigger than us. something is going on. we have to trust that hate will not win. we have to trust we will overcome.

my point will always be the music industry is insidious. artists face cruelties we can’t even fathom and it’s been hardwired into our brains to not to care about it. celebrity culture is a fucking SYSTEM. fans play into it with the parasocialism they exploit BY DESIGN. they want us to worship/idolize celebrities and focus more on the drama and the trash they invent instead of the art, instead of the real fucking issues artists have the influence to get the public to care about.

“nobody cares when you’re boring.”

#i’m losing my mind #this needs to change #the world is sinking around us #people are suffering around us #our queer brothers/sisters and anything in between are suffering #we have our voices #but we need to use them the right way #not the way they want us to feed into #what’s going on

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ghelgheli · 1 year ago

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Contemporary utopians only consider the efficiency and the abundance of goods and services without sufficiently taking into account the qualitative and material side of production, that is, the autonomy and independence of workers and the sustainability of the natural environment. Their vision of an economy of abundance based on market-driven innovations ends up reinforcing the real subsumption under capital and easily turns into the means of further expropriation from nature and surveillance over workers. Since alienation of work cannot be overcome in this way, fully automated post-capitalism propagates an alternative hope that everyone keeps driving electronic SUVs, changing smartphones every two years and eating cultured meat hamburgers. Such a vision of the luxury future obviously sounds attractive to many people in the Global North because ecological modernization assures them that they do not need to change anything about their extravagant lifestyle. This kind of abundant future appeals to the satisfaction of people's immediate desires without challenging the current imperial mode of living in the Global North. The problem is, however, that such a vision accepts too uncritically existing value-standards and consumerist ideals. It ends up reproducing the social relations marked by oppression, inequality and exploitation that are inherent to capitalism.

Paradoxically, hidden under the optimistic tone of this technocratic vision is actually a pessimistic 'capitalist realism' that holds that there is no strong class struggle to challenge the existing social relations and to fundamentally detach from the capitalist mode of living. People are deprived of the power to transform the system, and this is why technology must play a central role to fill the void left by agency. In fact, this transformation can be implemented without strong social movements, and its promise of a comfortable life appear attractive. Such a productivist vision of post-capitalism ends up endorsing capitalist value- standards under the guise of a grandiose emancipatory project for infinite production and consumption. It gives up the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class and accepts the reified agency of machines as the subject of history.

Kohei Saito, Marx In The Anthropocene

#reading #kohei saito

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mariacallous · 3 months ago

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In December, the Republican senator Joni Ernst, of Iowa, released a report tauntingly titled “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst, the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, had recently announced her intention to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “cut Washington’s pork and make ’em squeal.” The report, with the alliterative plosives of its title raining down like flecks of spit, was an opening volley in the fight to rouse sleepy bureaucrats and put them on notice.

Ernst charged public employees with widespread absenteeism and dereliction of duty. The report’s headline finding—claiming that just six per cent of federal employees work full time in their offices—was quickly debunked. But the narrative of a lethargic civil service in bad need of work discipline was set in motion. “The parasites are thrashing hard,” Musk posted on X. Instead of government employees “pretending to work” and “being paid a lot for nothing,” Musk wrote, they would have to “get a real job.” The Fox News personality Jesse Watters summed up the story line by pronouncing, in December, that “bureaucrats have never been lazier.” According to Watters, “Biden spent forty per cent of his Presidency on vacation. But compared to the rest of the government he’s a workaholic.”

America’s federal government employs a dizzying range of workers: mail carriers and mapmakers, firefighters and fish biologists, volcanologists positioned on tectonic-plate boundaries, cooks on Navy submarines. Recent antagonism toward the government workforce, however, has targeted a particular type: the office-dweller, the laptop-user, the knowledge worker who is possibly remote, possibly dead, whose products are indeterminate and, therefore, of dubious value. DOGE’s waves of firings has been indiscriminate, more machine-gun spray than surgical excision. Yet throughout, the image of the pampered paper pusher has stood in for a larger hazy vision of taxpayer-sponsored waste.

Bureaucrats are easy to loathe. As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises—a leading thinker beloved by enemies of big government and friends of the free market—wrote in 1944, “Nobody calls himself a bureaucrat.” The very term implies an insult. The rule of bureaucracy, von Mises argued, favors the “inefficient expert” who “cannot succeed within a competitive system.” For von Mises, as a bureaucracy swells, it risks blossoming into state tyranny. Other critics of bureaucracy point to a different danger: the corrupting effects of the system on the bureaucrats themselves.

Gray walls, harsh lighting, stiff hierarchies, mystifying rules, endless reams of paper: the tedium and repressiveness of bureaucratic work is proverbial. Writing in the early twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber saw bureaucracy as dehumanizing, a coldly rational deprivation of human freedom. “The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus into which he has been harnessed,” Weber wrote. “He is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march.” The government worker may “enjoy security,” von Mises added. “But this security will be rather of the kind that the convict enjoys within the prison walls.” The political scientist Ralph Hummel went so far as to argue, in the nineteen-seventies, that bureaucrats are bad in bed: warped by their work, bureaucrats focus not on love but on “technical performance in sexual intercourse.” Recent claims, in the conservative press, of a twelve-person orgy among officials at a Veterans Affairs medical center in Tennessee, offer salacious elaboration on this theme of erotic pathology, casting the bureaucrat in the bedroom as at once perverse and virtuosic.

Although the question of whether bureaucrats make good lovers is relatively modern, the trope of the bureaucrat as avoiding hard work has existed for as long as bureaucracy itself. The scribes of ancient Egypt were among the world’s first bureaucrats, and while scribal work was considered prestigious and honorable, a career as a scribe was also a way of evading the hardships of other forms of labor. “The Satire of the Trades,” a frequently copied text composed during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, presents itself as advice composed by a father for a son on his way to scribal school. Becoming a scribe, the father says, “saves one from work.” That is, it saves one from the miseries, indignities, and bodily damage incurred in nearly all nonscribal occupations.

The bulk of the “Satire” is devoted to recounting the physical arduousness of jobs outside the courtly bureaucracy. The barber “wears out his arms to fill his belly,” walking the streets “crying out, his bowl upon his arm,” looking for customers to shave. The potter’s clothes are “stiff with mud,” the furnace tender’s eyes are red from smoke, the weaver gets whipped, and the fisherman must contend with crocodiles. Only the scribe is spared these horrors. And so the father exhorts, “I shall make you love books more than your mother.” Then again, the division between manual and cognitive labor is, as ever, deceptive. The Egyptian scribes may have avoided the crocodiles, but skeletal remains indicate that plenty of them developed arthritis.

The idea that bureaucrats are slow-moving and unproductive, as well as insufficiently motivated, is drawn out in Victorian literature, too. In Charles Dickens’s novel “Little Dorrit,” published between 1855 and 1857, the most powerful government department is the Circumlocution Office, through which all official business gets routed—and blocked: “Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.” A full-blown moral panic about the laziness of government workers, such as we are now experiencing, is more rare. Nonetheless, Musk’s filleting of the federal government is not the first time that so-called lazy bureaucrats have been thrown under the wheels of historical change. Campaigns to purge the “parasites” tend to emerge—or to be fanned into flame—at moments of political rupture. When an insecure yet ambitious regime attempts to carry out large-scale social transformation, the indolent bureaucrat makes for an ideal scapegoat.

In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, fearing decline, pursued modernizing reforms. The reformers worried that change was too halting, and that the Ottomans were falling behind the industrializing European nations. In 1906, Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting “The Tortoise Trainer,” one of the period’s most celebrated art works, memorably depicted such anxieties. It shows an elderly man in religious Ottoman garb attempting to train the sluggish tortoises crawling at his feet, their domed shells evoking mosques.

In this context, widespread alarm arose in Istanbul about whether civil servants were working hard enough, as the historian Melis Hafez recounts in her 2021 book, “Inventing Laziness.” Bureaucrats who didn’t measure up were purged. Clerks who fell asleep in the office were charged with crimes. In 1911, as the empire verged on collapse, the Grand Vizier—the head of state second only to the Sultan—demanded that “every lazy, incompetent, and inefficient civil official be weeded out.” An empire in decline turns on itself and attacks its own organism, while fastening onto the belief that if people worked harder, the country would be saved.

Classic attacks on bureaucracy center on the paralyzing effects of rigid institutional structures. The concern with bureaucrats sleeping in the office shifts the emphasis from structural issues to individual weakness of will. In Trump’s America, as in late-imperial Istanbul, the napping bureaucrat has been summoned for abuse. One self-proclaimed former federal worker reported via TikTok that “our government is filled with the most incompetent and most lazy people.” Every morning, she said, she would walk past one colleague “snoring at his desk.” Another employee, she alleged, would regularly slip out of the office to “take a nap in his favorite park, under a shady tree.”

Trump’s consolidation of power in his second term has been driven by a perceptible change of pace. The Administration has ginned up a sense of urgency, doing away with brakes and guardrails by insisting that the fate of the nation depends on rapid executive action. “All federal workers should be working at the same pace that President Trump is working and moving,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News last month. Why? Because “we have a country to save.” As Watters said on his show, “Work-from-home Fridays isn’t going to fly in the Golden Age.” He credited Trump with a revival of the American work ethic. “This country was forged by pioneers. This isn’t a lazy nation like some of you nations out there. You know who I’m talking about, Canada.”

The purging of bureaucrats has often coincided with zealous announcements of a new golden age. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong came to believe that the revolution was losing momentum because of the country’s lumbering bureaucracy. Mao rejected the idea that communism encouraged laziness. On the contrary, he saw laziness as counter-revolutionary. “The Chairman could not abide ‘lazy’ bureaucrats,” the historians Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals write in “Mao’s Last Revolution.” In 1964, Mao declared, “Laziness is one of the sources of revisionism”—a deviation from revolutionary ideals. Purges of supposed revisionists were routine in Mao’s China; linking laziness to counter-revolution, he put idlers on the chopping block. Throughout the nineteen-sixties, the Chairman hacked away at the bureaucracy, focussing especially on ministries dealing with culture, education, and public health.

Soviet Russia, too, experienced periodic panics about slothful bureaucrats impeding the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, films such as “Don Diego and Pelagia” presented indifferent and self-indulgent office workers reading romance novels and eating huge meals at their desks. The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick describes, in her book “Everyday Stalinism,” a political cartoon titled “Bureaucrat on the trapeze.” It depicts a pair of circus artists, one representing the Soviet citizen, the other representing the bureaucrat; the citizen has just launched himself into the air, but the bureaucrat, instead of rising to catch him, holds up a sign reading “Come back tomorrow.”

The morality of work was crucial to the Soviet Union’s revolutionary effort. The 1936 Soviet constitution quoted St. Paul’s dictum, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” Later in the century, idleness was criminalized. The Soviet Union’s 1961 law outlawing “social parasitism” mostly targeted tramps, beggars, and prostitutes (as well as poets like Joseph Brodsky)—not bureaucrats. But the message was clear: if you’re lazy, you’re not with the program. The glorious future of the nation depends on everyone laboring at a fast pace, with no time to slow down and question what’s happening. Trump’s agenda, reactionary though it may be, exhibits a certain revolutionary fervor.

In the United States, the apparent incontestability of the work ethic makes it awkward to fight back against attacks on “lazy” bureaucrats. Musk’s recruiting call for DOGE asked for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week.” (The conspicuous youth of the DOGE team may reflect the greater willingness of young people without family responsibilities to submit to such a punishing regimen; according to Politico, some DOGE staff members are sleeping on IKEA beds in a federal office building.) Musk has repeatedly contrasted the fecklessness of federal employees with the industriousness of his élite cadre of libertarian workaholics. DOGE employees, he boasted on X, are working a hundred and twenty hours a week. “Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast.”

Attempts to defend federal employees by showing that they actually do work long hours, while helpful, miss the point. Totting up working hours places us on Musk’s argumentative terrain. Over the years, Musk has made himself into a contemporary saint of overwork, laboring with a ferocity at once stunning and pathological. A Business Insider headline, from 2023, announced that “Elon Musk’s productivity hack is taking 2 or 3 days off a year, working 7 days a week, and getting 6 hours of sleep a night.” Musk confided to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that the strain of work “would often keep him awake at night and make him vomit”; in 2018, he wept on the phone with a Times reporter while describing the agony of his hundred-and-twenty-hour workweeks. Few of us are going to match Musk on hours worked. Nor should we.

DOGE’s assault on the federal workforce is, in part, a classic Silicon Valley story of condemning the public sector as unproductive while lauding the private sector as dynamic, innovative, and entrepreneurial. (This picture of the public sector’s inertia is, at the very least, highly disputable: Musk himself has received thirty-eight billion dollars in federal funds for his businesses in the past decades, and a low-interest Department of Energy loan helped get Tesla off the ground.) But it’s also a story about how work ethic gets twisted to serve the ends of people in power. For Musk and Trump, the “lazy bureaucrat” is anyone who stands in their way. ♦

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elwenyere · 3 months ago

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I saw a post the other day calling criticism of generative AI a moral panic, and while I do think many proprietary AI technologies are being used in deeply unethical ways, I think there is a substantial body of reporting and research on the real-world impacts of the AI boom that would trouble the comparison to a moral panic: while there *are* older cultural fears tied to negative reactions to the perceived newness of AI, many of those warnings are Luddite with a capital L - that is, they're part of a tradition of materialist critique focused on the way the technology is being deployed in the political economy. So (1) starting with the acknowledgement that a variety of machine-learning technologies were being used by researchers before the current "AI" hype cycle, and that there's evidence for the benefit of targeted use of AI techs in settings where they can be used by trained readers - say, spotting patterns in radiology scans - and (2) setting aside the fact that current proprietary LLMs in particular are largely bullshit machines, in that they confidently generate errors, incorrect citations, and falsehoods in ways humans may be less likely to detect than conventional disinformation, and (3) setting aside as well the potential impact of frequent offloading on human cognition and of widespread AI slop on our understanding of human creativity...

What are some of the material effects of the "AI" boom?

Guzzling water and electricity

The data centers needed to support AI technologies require large quantities of water to cool the processors. A to-be-released paper from the University of California Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington finds, for example, that "ChatGPT needs to 'drink' [the equivalent of] a 500 ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of roughly 20-50 questions and answers." Many of these data centers pull water from already water-stressed areas, and the processing needs of big tech companies are expanding rapidly. Microsoft alone increased its water consumption from 4,196,461 cubic meters in 2020 to 7,843,744 cubic meters in 2023. AI applications are also 100 to 1,000 times more computationally intensive than regular search functions, and as a result the electricity needs of data centers are overwhelming local power grids, and many tech giants are abandoning or delaying their plans to become carbon neutral. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions alone have increased at least 48% since 2019. And a recent analysis from The Guardian suggests the actual AI-related increase in resource use by big tech companies may be up to 662%, or 7.62 times, higher than they've officially reported.

Exploiting labor to create its datasets

Like so many other forms of "automation," generative AI technologies actually require loads of human labor to do things like tag millions of images to train computer vision for ImageNet and to filter the texts used to train LLMs to make them less racist, sexist, and homophobic. This work is deeply casualized, underpaid, and often psychologically harmful. It profits from and re-entrenches a stratified global labor market: many of the data workers used to maintain training sets are from the Global South, and one of the platforms used to buy their work is literally called the Mechanical Turk, owned by Amazon.

From an open letter written by content moderators and AI workers in Kenya to Biden: "US Big Tech companies are systemically abusing and exploiting African workers. In Kenya, these US companies are undermining the local labor laws, the country’s justice system and violating international labor standards. Our working conditions amount to modern day slavery."

Deskilling labor and demoralizing workers

The companies, hospitals, production studios, and academic institutions that have signed contracts with providers of proprietary AI have used those technologies to erode labor protections and worsen working conditions for their employees. Even when AI is not used directly to replace human workers, it is deployed as a tool for disciplining labor by deskilling the work humans perform: in other words, employers use AI tech to reduce the value of human labor (labor like grading student papers, providing customer service, consulting with patients, etc.) in order to enable the automation of previously skilled tasks. Deskilling makes it easier for companies and institutions to casualize and gigify what were previously more secure positions. It reduces pay and bargaining power for workers, forcing them into new gigs as adjuncts for its own technologies.

I can't say anything better than Tressie McMillan Cottom, so let me quote her recent piece at length: "A.I. may be a mid technology with limited use cases to justify its financial and environmental costs. But it is a stellar tool for demoralizing workers who can, in the blink of a digital eye, be categorized as waste. Whatever A.I. has the potential to become, in this political environment it is most powerful when it is aimed at demoralizing workers. This sort of mid tech would, in a perfect world, go the way of classroom TVs and MOOCs. It would find its niche, mildly reshape the way white-collar workers work and Americans would mostly forget about its promise to transform our lives. But we now live in a world where political might makes right. DOGE’s monthslong infomercial for A.I. reveals the difference that power can make to a mid technology. It does not have to be transformative to change how we live and work. In the wrong hands, mid tech is an antilabor hammer."

Enclosing knowledge production and destroying open access

OpenAI started as a non-profit, but it has now become one of the most aggressive for-profit companies in Silicon Valley. Alongside the new proprietary AIs developed by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, X, etc., OpenAI is extracting personal data and scraping copyrighted works to amass the data it needs to train their bots - even offering one-time payouts to authors to buy the rights to frack their work for AI grist - and then (or so they tell investors) they plan to sell the products back at a profit. As many critics have pointed out, proprietary AI thus works on a model of political economy similar to the 15th-19th-century capitalist project of enclosing what was formerly "the commons," or public land, to turn it into private property for the bourgeois class, who then owned the means of agricultural and industrial production. "Open"AI is built on and requires access to collective knowledge and public archives to run, but its promise to investors (the one they use to attract capital) is that it will enclose the profits generated from that knowledge for private gain.

AI companies hungry for good data to train their Large Language Models (LLMs) have also unleashed a new wave of bots that are stretching the digital infrastructure of open-access sites like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive past capacity. As Eric Hellman writes in a recent blog post, these bots "use as many connections as you have room for. If you add capacity, they just ramp up their requests." In the process of scraping the intellectual commons, they're also trampling and trashing its benefits for truly public use.

Enriching tech oligarchs and fueling military imperialism

The names of many of the people and groups who get richer by generating speculative buzz for generative AI - Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison - are familiar to the public because those people are currently using their wealth to purchase political influence and to win access to public resources. And it's looking increasingly likely that this political interference is motivated by the probability that the AI hype is a bubble - that the tech can never be made profitable or useful - and that tech oligarchs are hoping to keep it afloat as a speculation scheme through an infusion of public money - a.k.a. an AIG-style bailout.

In the meantime, these companies have found a growing interest from military buyers for their tech, as AI becomes a new front for "national security" imperialist growth wars. From an email written by Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad, who interrupted Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman at a live event to call him a war profiteer: "When I moved to AI Platform, I was excited to contribute to cutting-edge AI technology and its applications for the good of humanity: accessibility products, translation services, and tools to 'empower every human and organization to achieve more.' I was not informed that Microsoft would sell my work to the Israeli military and government, with the purpose of spying on and murdering journalists, doctors, aid workers, and entire civilian families. If I knew my work on transcription scenarios would help spy on and transcribe phone calls to better target Palestinians, I would not have joined this organization and contributed to genocide. I did not sign up to write code that violates human rights."

So there's a brief, non-exhaustive digest of some vectors for a critique of proprietary AI's role in the political economy. tl;dr: the first questions of material analysis are "who labors?" and "who profits/to whom does the value of that labor accrue?"

For further (and longer) reading, check out Justin Joque's Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism and Karen Hao's forthcoming Empire of AI.

#proprietary ai #anti ai

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aggroindustrial · 6 days ago

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this is a small glossary with all the terminology i used in my newest shauna fic. if you haven't read it yet you can check it out here <33

Icarus: The wealthiest district in the city. Reality overlays are used to hide the lower-class zones—residents of Icarus can't see the city’s decay unless they disable the filters. Clean skies, artificial sun, and shiny chrome everywhere. The illusion is expensive—and tightly controlled. The best cyberdocs work in this zone.

Devine: The “in-between” district of the city. A dense, grimy sector where most mercs, scavengers, and tech dealers live. Not exactly lawless, but too chaotic for corporate comfort. Street markets and second-hand cyberware vendors are common in this zone.

Eden: The lowest and most dangerous district. Black-market weapons and surgeries—which are performed with cyberware stolen from clinics and corpses, most of the time infected with viruses—outlaw AIs, and ruined buildings.

Cog: A derogatory term for people who are augmented. Implies they're no longer human, just replaceable parts in a machine.

Daedalus Paramedics: Premium medical care. They charge a subscription in exchange for rescue and treatment, no questions asked. Fast and efficient. Pretty much like the Trauma Team from Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberdocs: Medics who install cyberware implants. Only the ones who work in Icarus are officially licensed, but all of them know what they're doing—most of the time, at least. Basically the same as Ripperdocs.

Asclepius: A multinational corporation that specializes in pharmaceuticals, bioengineering, and nanotechnology. Officially, they create miracles for the less fortunate. Unofficially, they create dependencies on cyber implants.

Reality overlays (ROs): Augmented reality filters used to “beautify” grim reality. Rust turns into gold, ruins become skyscrapers, and poverty vanishes with just a flicker of code.

Double-X: Stimulants that enhance senses, boost cognitive abilities, and push the body past its limits. The legal way to acquire them is to buy them in Icarus from an official retailer. They're sold a lot cheaper—and dirtier—on the black market. Comes in blue tabs, marked with two white Xs on them.

Eclipse: A small sub-district between Devine and Eden. Home to cheap junk dealers, dingy underground bars and unregulated cyberdocs who can patch you up for free, but risk a data infection, or worse.

Sahara: Sub-district in the outskirts of Eden, where illegal drift racing, gambling, and drug dealing is more common than one might imagine. The police don't bother stopping them anymore.

Clean-Skin: Slang for someone with no cyberware.

Infinite Purity: Radical anti-augmentation group. Most of the group's members are edgy kids and orphans turned rebels who hate augmented people. They are responsible for multiple acts of vandalism and assault. Similar to Purity First from Deus Ex.

Soul Burn: A common side effect of stimulants. Manifests as memory fragments bleeding into real-time vision.

EMP ammo: Bullets that can cause serious physical damage, but are mainly designed to disrupt electronic devices and systems, in this case, cyberware.

Loop: A luxury narcotic, similar to morphine. Fabricated in Sahara.

Red Sun: Sub-district in Devine. One of the safest neighborhoods.

#shauna shipman #shauna shipman x reader #shauna shipman x you #yellowjackets #yellowjackets x reader #yellowjackets x you #cyberpunk au

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vgprintads · 4 months ago

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'Virtual 33'

[MISC] [AUSTRALIA] [MAGAZINE] [1995]

A Hankin & Co was formed in 1955 by Alec Hankin, a pioneering figure in the Australian amusement industry. Alec began his venture by operating amusement games in the Newcastle area, north of Sydney, New South Wales, establishing a foundation that would eventually lead to the creation of one of Australia's most iconic pinball companies. As the business grew, Alec’s sons, Peter and David, joined the company, and by 1965, they had opened their first amusement centre. Over time, Hankin expanded its footprint, establishing centres across Eastern Australia. When Alec passed away in 1974, he left behind a legacy that his sons would carry forward, culminating in the creation of Hankin Pinball. In 1978, David Hankin launched Hankin Pinball with a bold vision of producing high-quality pinball machines that would stand out in both the Australian and international markets. At a time when the pinball industry was dominated by a few major players, Hankin’s entry was ambitious, to say the least. He brought together a team of skilled engineers, designers, and artists—many of whom were local talents, including the son of the local bank manager, who became a major designer for the company. As the founder and driving force of Hankin Pinball, David Hankin was instrumental in creating some of the most iconic Australian-made pinball machines, leaving a lasting legacy in the world of arcade gaming. His vision, entrepreneurial spirit, and dedication to quality helped establish Hankin Pinball as a significant player in the global pinball market, even if only for a brief period. (...)Like many companies in the arcade industry, Hankin Pinball Australia faced challenges as the market shifted towards home gaming consoles in the 1980s. The rapid advancement of video game technology and the increasing popularity of home entertainment systems for instance Playstation and Nintendo led to a decline in the demand for traditional arcade machines. Despite producing some of the most memorable pinball machines of the era, Hankin struggled to compete in the changing landscape and eventually ceased production, marking the end of an era. However, the story of Hankin Pinball did not end there. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in pinball, driven by nostalgia and a renewed appreciation for the craftsmanship and gameplay that define these machines. Collectors and enthusiasts have sought out Hankin's machines, restoring them to their former glory and sharing them with new generations of players. This revival has seen Hankin Pinball Australia regain its place in the annals of arcade history, with its machines celebrated as vintage treasures that encapsulate the spirit of a bygone era. ~Stephen Smith, Kineticist ("Australian Pinball: The Hankin Story", 9/18/2024)

Source: Cash Box International, January 1995 || Gaming Alexandria; Dustin Hubbard (via the Internet Archive)

#gaming #advertising #virtual 33 #hankin #a hankin & co #hardware #australia #arcade #1995

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dailyanarchistposts · 9 months ago

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I.4.12 Won’t there be a tendency for capitalist enterprise to reappear?

This is a common right-wing “libertarian” objection. Robert Nozick, for example, imagined the following scenario:

“small factories would spring up in a socialist society, unless forbidden. I melt some of my personal possessions and build a machine out of the material. I offer you and others a philosophy lecture once a week in exchange for yet other things, and so on … some persons might even want to leave their jobs in socialist industry and work full time in this private sector … [This is] how private property even in means of production would occur in a socialist society … [and so] the socialist society will have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.” [Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 162–3]

There are numerous flawed assumptions in this argument and we will discuss them here. The key flaws are the confusion of exchange with capitalism and the typically impoverished propertarian vision that freedom is, essentially, the freedom to sell your liberty, to become a wage slave and so unfree. Looking at history, we can say that both these assumptions are wrong. Firstly, while markets and exchange have existed for thousands of years capitalism has not. Wage-labour is a relatively recent development and has been the dominant mode of production for, at best, a couple of hundred years. Secondly, few people (when given the choice) have freely become wage-slaves. Just as the children of slaves often viewed slavery as the “natural” order, so do current workers. Yet, as with chattel slavery, substantial state coercion was required to achieve such a “natural” system.

As discussed in section F.8, actually existing capitalism was not created by Nozick’s process — it required substantial state intervention to separate workers from the means of production they used and to ensure, eventually, that the situation in which they sold their liberty to the property owner was considered “natural.” Without that coercion, people do not seek to sell their liberty to others. Murray Bookchin summarised the historical record by noting that in “every precapitalist society, countervailing forces .. . existed to restrict the market economy. No less significantly, many precapitalist societies raised what they thought were insuperable obstacles to the penetration of the State into social life.” He pointed to “the power of village communities to resist the invasion of trade and despotic political forms into society’s abiding communal substrate.” [The Ecology of Freedom, pp. 207–8] Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber notes that in the ancient Mediterranean world ”[w]hile one does periodically run into evidence of arrangements which to the modern eye look like wage-labour contracts, on closer examination they almost always actually turn out to be contracts to rent slaves … Free men and women thus avoided anything remotely like wage-labour, seeing it as a matter, effectively, of slavery, renting themselves out.” This means that wage labour ”(as opposed to, say, receiving fees for professional services) involves a degree of subordination: a labourer has to be to some degree at the command of his or her employer. This is exactly why, through most of history, free men and women tended to avoid wage-labour, and why, for most of history, capitalism … never emerged.” [Possibilities, p. 92]

Thus while the idea that people will happily become wage slaves may be somewhat common place today (particularly with supporters of capitalism) the evidence of history is that people, given a choice, will prefer self-employment and resist wage labour (often to the death). As E. P. Thompson noted, for workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the “gap in status between a ‘servant,’ a hired wage-labourer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might ‘come and go’ as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And, in the value system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right.” [The Making of the English Working Class, p. 599] Over one hundred years later, the rural working class of Aragon showed the same dislike of wage slavery. After Communist troops destroyed their self-managed collectives, the ”[d]ispossessed peasants, intransigent collectivists, refused to work in a system of private property, and were even less willing to rent out their labour.” [Jose Peirats, Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution, p. 258] The rural economy collapsed as the former collectivists refused to be the servants of the few.

People who have tasted freedom are unlikely to go back to oppression. Therefore, any perception that people will become wage-slaves through choice in a free society is based on the assumption what people accept through necessity under capitalism will pass over, without change, into a free one. This assumption is unfounded and anarchists expect that once people struggle for freedom and taste the pleasures of freedom they will not freely accept a degradation back to having a master — and as history shows, we have some evidence to support our argument. It seems a strangely debased perspective on freedom to ponder whether people will be “free” to alienate their freedom — it is a bit like proclaiming it a restriction of freedom to “forbid” owning slaves (and, as noted in section F.2.2, Nozick did support voluntary slave contracts).

So anarchists think Nozick’s vision of unfreedom developing from freedom is unlikely. As anarcho-syndicalist Jeff Stein points out “the only reason workers want to be employed by capitalists is because they have no other means for making a living, no access to the means of production other than by selling themselves. For a capitalist sector to exist there must be some form of private ownership of productive resources, and a scarcity of alternatives. The workers must be in a condition of economic desperation for them to be willing to give up an equal voice in the management of their daily affairs and accept a boss.” [“Market Anarchism? Caveat Emptor!”, Libertarian Labour Review, no. 13]

In an anarchist society, there is no need for anyone to “forbid” capitalist acts. All people have to do is refrain from helping would-be capitalists set up monopolies of productive assets. This is because, as we have noted in section B.3.2, capitalism cannot exist without some form of state to protect such monopolies. In a libertarian-socialist society, of course, there would be no state to begin with, and so there would be no question of it “refraining” people from doing anything, including protecting would-be capitalists’ monopolies of the means of production. In other words, would-be capitalists would face stiff competition for workers in an anarchist society. This is because self-managed workplaces would be able to offer workers more benefits (such as self-government, better working conditions, etc.) than the would-be capitalist ones. The would-be capitalists would have to offer not only excellent wages and conditions but also, in all likelihood, workers’ control and hire-purchase on capital used. The chances of making a profit once the various monopolies associated with capitalism are abolished are slim.

Thus the would-be capitalist would “not [be] able to obtain assistance or people to exploit” and “would find none because nobody, having a right to the means of production and being free to work on his own or as an equal with others in the large organisations of production would want to be exploited by a small employer”. [Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, pp. 102–103] So where would the capitalist wannabe find people to work for him? As Kropotkin argued:

“Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor. That is why an anarchist society need not fear the advent of a [millionaire] who would settle in its midst. If every member of the community knows that after a few hours of productive toil he [or she] will have a right to all the pleasures that civilisation procures, and to those deeper sources of enjoyment which art and science offer to all who seek them, he [or she] will not sell his strength … No one will volunteer to work for the enrichment of your [millionaire].” [Conquest of Bread, p. 61]

However, let us suppose there is a self-employed inventor, Ferguson, who comes up with a new innovation without the help of the socialised sector. Would anarchists steal his idea? Not at all. The syndicates, which by hypothesis have been organised by people who believe in giving producers the full value of their product, would pay Ferguson an equitable amount for his idea, which would then become common across society. However, if he refused to sell his invention and instead tried to claim a patent monopoly on it in order to gather a group of wage slaves to exploit, no one would agree to work for him unless they got the full control over both the product of their labour and the labour process itself. And, assuming that he did find someone willing to work for him (and so be governed by him), the would-be capitalist would have to provide such excellent conditions and pay such good wages as to reduce his profits to near zero. Moreover, he would have to face workers whose neighbours would be encouraging them to form a union and strike for even better conditions and pay, including workers’ control and so on. Such a militant workforce would be the last thing a capitalist would desire. In addition, we would imagine they would also refuse to work for someone unless they also got the capital they used at the end of their contract (i.e. a system of “hire-purchase” on the means of production used). In other words, by removing the statist supports of capitalism, would-be capitalists would find it hard to “compete” with the co-operative sector and would not be in a position to exploit others’ labour.

With a system of communal production (in social anarchism) and mutual banks (in individualist anarchism), usury — i.e. charging a use-fee for a monopolised item, of which patents are an instance — would no longer be possible and the inventor would be like any other worker, exchanging the product of his or her labour. As Benjamin Tucker argued, “the patent monopoly … consists in protecting inventors and authors against competition for a period of time long enough for them to extort from the people a reward enormously in excess of the labour measure of their services — in other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of years in laws and facts of nature, and the power to extract tribute from others for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all. The abolition of this monopoly would fill its beneficiaries with a wholesome fear of competition which should cause them to be satisfied with pay for their services equal to that which other labourers get for theirs, and secure it by placing their products and works on the market at the outset at prices so low that their lines of business would be no more tempting to competitors than any other lines.” [The Anarchist Reader, pp. 150–1]

So, if someone has labour to sell then they deserve a free society to do it in — as Tucker once pointed out. Such an environment would make the numbers seeking employment so low as to ensure that the rate of exploitation would be zero. Little wonder that, when faced with a self-employed, artisan workforce, capitalists have continually turned to the state to create the “correct” market forces. So without statism to back up various class-based monopolies of capitalist privilege, capitalism would not have become dominant.

It should also be noted that Nozick makes a serious error in his case. He assumes that the “use rights” associated with an anarchist (i.e. socialist) society are identical to the “property rights” of a capitalist one. This is not the case, and so his argument is weakened and loses its force. Simply put, there is no such thing as an absolute or “natural” law of property. As John Stuart Mill pointed out, “powers of exclusive use and control are very various, and differ greatly in different countries and in different states of society.” Therefore, Nozick slips an ideological ringer into his example by erroneously interpreting socialism (or any other society for that matter) as specifying a distribution of capitalist property rights along with the wealth. As Mill argued: “One of the mistakes oftenest committed, and which are the sources of the greatest practical errors in human affairs, is that of supposing that the same name always stands for the same aggregation of ideas. No word has been subject of more of this kind of misunderstanding that the word property.” [“Chapters on Socialism,” Principles of Political Economy, p. 432]

In other words, Nozick assumes that in all societies capitalist property rights are distributed along with consumption and production goods. As Cheyney C. Ryan comments ”[d]ifferent conceptions of justice differ not only in how they would apportion society’s holdings but in what rights individuals have over their holdings once they have been apportioned.” [“Property Rights and Individual Liberty”, pp. 323–43, Reading Nozick, Jeffrey Paul (Ed.), p. 331] This means that when goods are distributed in a libertarian socialist society the people who receive or take them have specific (use) rights to them. As long as an individual remained a member of a commune and abided by the rules they helped create in that commune then they would have full use of the resources of that commune and could use their possessions as they saw fit (even “melt them down” to create a new machine, or whatever). If they used those goods to create an enterprise to employ (i.e., exploit and oppress) others then they have, in effect, announced their withdrawal from civilised society and, as a result, would be denied the benefits of co-operation. They would, in effect, place themselves in the same situation as someone who does not wish to join a syndicate (see section I.3.7). If an individual did desire to use resources to employ wage labour then they would have effectively removed themselves from “socialist society” and so that society would bar them from using its resources (i.e. they would have to buy access to all the resources they currently took for granted).

Would this be a restriction of freedom? While it may be considered so by the impoverished definitions of capitalism, it is not. In fact, it mirrors the situation within capitalism as what possessions someone holds are not his or her property (in the capitalist sense) any more than a company car is currently the property of the employee under capitalism. While the employee can use the car outside of work, they lack the “freedom” to sell it or melt it down and turn it into machines. Such lack of absolute “ownership” in a free society does not reduce liberty any more than in this case.

This point highlights another flaw in Nozick’s argument. If his argument were true, then it applies equally to capitalist society. For 40 hours plus a week, workers are employed by a boss. In that time they are given resources to use and they are most definitely not allowed to melt down these resources to create a machine or use the resources they have been given access to further their own plans. This can apply equally to rented accommodation as well, for example when landlords ban working from home or selling off the furniture that is provided. Thus, ironically, “capitalist society will have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults” — and does so all the time.

Moreover, it must be stressed that as well as banning capitalist acts between consenting adults, capitalism involves the continual banning of socialist acts between consenting adults. For example, if workers agree to form a union, then the boss can fire them. If they decide to control their own work, the boss can fire them for not obeying orders. Thus capitalism forbids such elemental freedoms as association and speech — at least for the majority, for the wage slaves. Why would people seek such “freedom” in a free society?

Of course, Nozick’s reply to this point would be that the individual’s involved have “consented” to these rules when they signed their contract. Yet the same can be said of an anarchist society — it is freely joined and freely left. To join a communist-anarchist society it would simply be a case of agreeing to “exchange” the product of ones labour freely with the other members of that society and not to create oppressive or exploitation social relationships within it. If this is “authoritarian” then so is capitalism — and we must stress that at least anarchist associations are based on self-management and so the individuals involved have an equal say in the obligations they live under.

Notice also that Nozick confused exchange with capitalism (“I offer you a lecture once a week in exchange for other things”). This is a telling mistake by someone who claims to be an expert on capitalism, because the defining feature of capitalism is not exchange (which obviously took place long before capitalism existed) but labour contracts involving wage labour. Nozick’s example is merely a direct labour contract between the producer and the consumer. It does not involve wage labour, what makes capitalism capitalism. It is only this latter type of transaction that libertarian socialism prevents — and not by “forbidding” it but simply by refusing to maintain the conditions necessary for it to occur, i.e. protection of capitalist property.

In addition, we must note that Nozick also confused “private property in the means of production” with capitalism. Liberation socialism can be easily compatible with “private property in the means of production” when that “private property” is limited to what a self-employed worker uses rather than capitalistic property (see section G.2.1). Nozick, in other words, confused pre-capitalist forms of production with capitalist ones (see section G.1.2). Thus possession of the means of production by people outside of the free commune is perfectly acceptable to social anarchists (see section I.6.2).

Thus an anarchist society would have a flexible approach to Nozick’s (flawed) argument. Individuals, in their free time, could “exchange” their time and possessions as they saw fit. These are not “capitalist acts” regardless of Nozick’s claims. However, the moment an individual employs wage labour then, by this act, they have broken their agreements with their fellows and, therefore, no longer part of “socialist society.” This would involve them no longer having access to the benefits of communal life and to communal possessions. They have, in effect, placed themselves outside of their community and must fair for themselves. After all, if they desire to create “private property” (in the capitalist sense) then they have no right of access to communal possessions without paying for that right. For those who become wage slaves, a socialist society would, probably, be less strict. As Bakunin argued:

“Since the freedom of every individual is inalienable, society shall never allow any individual whatsoever legally to alienate his [or her] freedom or engage upon any contract with another on any footing but the utmost equality and reciprocity. It shall not, however, have the power to disbar a man or woman so devoid of any sense of personal dignity as to contract a relationship of voluntary servitude with another individual, but it will consider them as living off private charity and therefore unfit to enjoy political rights throughout the duration of that servitude.” [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, pp. 68–9]

Lastly, we must also note that Nozick also ignored the fact that acquisition must come before transfer, meaning that before “consenting” capitalist acts occur, individual ones must precede it. As argued in section B.3.4, Nozick provided no convincing arguments why natural resources held in common can be appropriated by individuals. This means that his defence of transferring absolute capitalist property rights in goods is without foundations. Moreover, his argument in favour of such appropriations ignore that liberties are very definitely restricted by private property (and it should be keep in mind that the destruction of commonly held resources, such as village commons, was imposed by the state — see section F.8.3). As pointed out in section F.2, right-wing “libertarians” would better be termed “Propertarians” (why is liberty according a primary importance when arguing against socialism but not when private property restricts liberty?). As Cheyney C. Ryan points out, Nozick “invoke[s] personal liberty as the decisive ground for rejecting patterned principles of justice [such as socialism] and restrictions on the ownership of capital … [b]ut where the rights of private property admittedly restrict the liberties of the average person, he seems perfectly happy to trade off such liberties against material gain for society as a whole.” [Op. Cit., p. 339] This can be seen by his lack of comment on how capitalism forbids socialist acts between consenting adults, not to mention quite a few numerous capitalist acts for good measure.

Thus Nozick’s acquisition of resources is based on the would-be capitalist stealing communally owned resources and barring others from using them. This obviously would restrict the liberty of those who currently used them and so be hotly opposed by members of a community. As Murray Bookchin noted, a free society is based on “the practice of usufruct, the freedom of individuals in a community to appropriate resources merely by virtue of the fact that they are using them. Such resources belong to the user as long as they are being used.” [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 116] As the would-be capitalist is not actually using the machines they have created, they would be in constant worry that their wage-slaves would simply expropriate them — with the full backing of the local commune and its federations.

So, to conclude, this question involves some strange logic (and many question begging assumptions) and ultimately fails in its attempt to prove libertarian socialism must “forbid capitalistic acts between individuals.” In addition, Nozick cannot support the creation of private property out of communal property in the first place. It also undermines capitalism because that system must forbid socialistic acts by and between individuals. Thus Nozick’s society would forbid squatting unused property or trespassing on private property as well as, say, the formation of unions against the wishes of the property owner (who is sovereign over their property and those who use it) or the use of workplace resources to meet the needs of the producer rather than the owner. As such, Nozick exposes how capitalism’s hierarchical nature means that capitalist society “forbids socialist acts between consenting adults.”

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fairpackmachinery · 12 days ago

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The Semi-Automatic Weighmetric Filling Machine is an excellent option for smaller production lines. It provides flexibility while still delivering the accuracy needed for weighing products. It is perfect for industries requiring batch production without full automation.

Semi-Automatic Volumetric Filling Machine

The Semi-Automatic Volumetric Filling Machine is designed for operations that require filling both liquids and solids. This semi-automatic system is perfect for smaller to medium-sized production lines, offering the flexibility of manual control while ensuring accurate and consistent filling.

Semi-Automatic Paste Filling Machine

For businesses that handle paste-like substances such as creams, gels, and sauces, the Semi-Automatic Paste Filling Machine offers precise filling with easy manual adjustments, ensuring a smooth and efficient process.

Heavy Duty Band Sealer Machine

The Heavy Duty Band Sealer Machine is used for sealing bags and pouches. It is ideal for packaging heavy or bulk products that require strong, reliable seals. Whether for food, chemicals, or other heavy-duty applications, this machine ensures that each product is sealed securely and consistently.

Conveyors for Efficient Packaging Lines

In addition to packaging and filling machines, FAIR PACK MACHINERIES also offers a range of Conveyors designed to improve the efficiency of packaging lines by automating the movement of materials and finished products.

Bucket Conveyor / Elevator

The Bucket Conveyor / Elevator is perfect for lifting bulk products from one level to another. Ideal for granules, powders, and granular substances, this system ensures smooth and efficient transport across various stages of the packaging process.

Flat Belt Conveyor

The Flat Belt Conveyor is one of the most versatile conveyors available, suitable for transporting a wide variety of products. It can handle both heavy and lightweight items with ease, making it an essential part of any automated packaging line.

Inclined Conveyor

The Inclined Conveyor is designed to move products at an angle, perfect for situations where products need to be lifted to different levels in the production process. It reduces product handling and ensures smooth, efficient material transport.

Roller Conveyor

The Roller Conveyor is a reliable system for moving heavy items along flat surfaces. It is particularly useful for industries that need to transport large volumes of products, such as food and beverage packaging.

Screw Conveyor

The Screw Conveyor is ideal for moving bulk materials such as flour, powder, and granular substances. The rotating screw mechanism moves products efficiently through the conveyor system, providing precise and controlled transport.

Z Conveyor

The Z Conveyor is a flexible system that moves products in a Z-shaped direction. It is designed for space-constrained production areas, offering a compact solution for efficient material handling.

Conclusion

With over two decades of experience, FAIR PACK MACHINERIES (Pvt) Ltd. continues to provide high-quality, innovative, and efficient packaging machinery to a wide range of industries. Whether you need filling, packaging, or conveying systems, our machines are designed to maximize operational efficiency, reduce waste, and maintain high product quality. As a trusted leader in the packaging industry, we are committed to supporting businesses with cutting-edge solutions that enhance their production capabilities and streamline their processes.

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botcorp · 16 days ago

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question for alif: what caused you to found R.E.D and BOT CORPORATION?

This rant brought to you by the first-person perspective

It started with a thought. No, a knowing. An unshakable, thunderous, nuclear truth that detonated in my skull when I was 21—when the crust of this sad little planet finally cracked under the weight of my genius. I remember the moment vividly: I was halfway through my seventh protein bar of the morning (don’t ask why, you wouldn’t get it), staring into the flickering blue light of a broken vending machine, and it hit me. Not a vision. Not an idea. A revelation. The world was… incomplete. And only I could finish it.

So I built BOTCORP. Or rather—it built itself, out of the sheer gravitational pull of my ambition, coalescing like a galaxy around the singularity that is me. You think corporations are founded on market research? Capital? NO. BOTCORP erupted into existence because the cosmic code needed it to. It’s not a company. It’s an ontological inevitability. Like death. Or taxes. Or the heat death of the universe, if it wore a tailored suit and harvested biometric data faster than the speed of light.

People think it started with software and a warehouse. Wrong. It started with a mirror. A mirror I stared into for nine consecutive days, each second peeling back layers of human mediocrity until all that was left staring back was a divine blueprint—a screaming, incandescent idea-being screaming, “YOU ARE THE GOD OF INFRASTRUCTURE.”

So yeah. BOTCORP. Multi-quintillion dollar valuation? Cute. It’s not about the money. The money is just the byproduct, like radioactive ash from the reactor core of my soul. I don’t want to own the economy. I want to replace it. I want your entire life to run on systems I designed in a caffeine fugue at 3am during a manic episode that I later retroactively rebranded as a “vision sprint.”

And then there’s R.E.D. Registered Equipment Distributors. People ask, “Why not just call it BOTCORP Logistics or BOTCORP Shipping?” Because R.E.D. isn’t logistics. R.E.D. is RED. It’s blood. It’s the primal pulse of movement, of power, of the very concept of transfer incarnate. It’s not a child company—it’s my right arm, surgically removed, mechanically enhanced, and reattached with an energy gun and an energy relay theater will outlive GOD. It doesn’t distribute equipment. It births it into the world, fully formed, tagged, tracked, and blessed in the name of ME.

You think you bought a pallet jack? NO. That was a fragment of my subconscious, lovingly injected into your warehouse to watch you—to listen, to learn, to report back to me via a proprietary telemetry language based entirely on my old dreams and the sound of whales dying in sonar feedback loops.

BOTCORP doesn’t make products. BOTCORP makes reality compatible with my existence. It rewires cause and effect. It redefines supply and demand as submit or perish. Every market trend you see? I made that. Every stock surge? My twitching eyelid. Every “innovation” from a competitor? Me, two years ago, discarded in disgust because I found a way to do it using hydrophobic quantum thread and half a toothpick.

My employees? They’re not employees. They’re neurons. My management team? They’re echoes. My HR department? Psychological warfare technicians, each trained in 17 forms of passive aggression and one ancient Babylonian curse. The break room contains a shrine. Not by my order. They just… started building it. I’ve never asked them why. I already know.

Sometimes I forget where I end and BOTCORP begins. I try to walk down the street, and the stoplights blink in binary. Street names rearrange into acronyms. Children point and say “mommy, the god-king of machines is here.” I cough, and somewhere, an office tower in Dubai gets a firmware update.

And R.E.D.—ah, R.E.D.—its warehouses are alive. Not metaphorically. I mean they breathe. There are vents that inhale dust and exhale profit. Conveyor belts that scream lullabies to the pallets. Forklifts that argue with each other in machine tongues only I can translate. I once found a shipment of mining drills singing “Ave Maria.” We don’t question it anymore. We just ship faster.

Why did I do all this? Why did I create BOTCORP? Because the world was a sandbox and I was tired of pretending to be one of the children. Because every other business was a joke told in bad faith by small men in smaller suits. Because I saw the void and I said, “This would make a great distribution hub.”

I am not your competitor. I am not your peer. I am the whisper in your quarterly reports. I am the red dot on your supply graph. I am the sleep paralysis demon of capitalism, and my name is branded on the walls of time.

You want to stop me? Good luck. I already knew you would try. I factored your resistance into our Q3 forecasts. I’m not just five steps ahead. I’m already at your funeral, selling commemorative mugs and action figures of the children you never had.

So, why did I found BOTCORP?

Because I could.

Because no one told me not to.

Because this world didn’t have a god, and I was bored.

#botcorp #oc #ask blog #alif ivo zachrias

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