Elon Musk's secret laboratory.

Mass data collection.

According to reports from Business Insider, behind the cameras and Elon Musk's visionary speeches, there is an experiment that sounds more like science fiction than reality, a laboratory dedicated to collecting every human movement, gesture and routine to teach its robots to perfectly imitate people's behavior.

The project supposedly carried out secretly by Tesla in the so-called Optimus laboratory, is creating the largest database of human movements on the planet with hundreds of workers, known internally as data collectors, spending hours connected to a recording system that includes five cameras attached to a helmet and an 18 kg backpack full of sensors.

The mission is to repeat simple human tasks such as cleaning a table, serving coffee, sweeping the floor or assembling parts on a conveyor belt and this is repeated hundreds of times a day as naturally as possible. According to published reports, the tasks range from common household activities to absurd requests generated by artificial intelligence such as imitating animals, dancing or crawling.

Optimus, the greatest product of all time

The goal is to create millions of hours of recordings that serve as the basis for training the humanoid robot Óptimus, Musk's big bet to transform Tesla into a global automation company. In each 8-hour shift, workers must generate 4 hours of usable recordings and any movement considered not human enough can result in penalties.

One former employee described the routine as, in quotes, being a lab mouse under the microscope, repeating the same gestures to the point of exhaustion; These data make up what Musk calls optimal body training, an essential phase before the robot is capable of acting without human teleoperation. Currently, even during public presentations, Tesla thefts still rely on some remote control situations and AI-choreographed demonstrations.

Despite the limitations, Musk maintains ambitious goals, wanting 5,000 robots ready by the end of 2026 and projecting 1 million units annually in the next decade. The plan is to turn Optimus into the greatest product of all time, capable of revolutionizing the world economy. According to Musk, each theft would have five times the productivity of a human operating 24 hours a day.

The bold vision, a world where human work is optional, Musk even claimed could eliminate poverty and multiply the global economy by 10.

During a shareholder meeting, the public applauded him as he said that robots could even replace the prison system, monitoring offenders in real time instead of physically imprisoning them, but between the ideal and reality there is a gigantic distance, for now, Óptimus remains limited to simple tasks and imprecise movements and training based on humans recording their own actions seems a paradoxical portrait of the future that Musk promises.

To teach robots to replace us, for now we have to act like robots, Musk himself acknowledged in a recent interview that the process will be long and turbulent; “Work will be optional,” he said, but until now we get to that point there will be a lot of trauma and rupture along the way and no one is prepared for the transition. He also added a globalist idea, the universal basic income that will be necessary, among other measures that will have to be taken.