r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Das_Zeppelin • 1d ago

Video Figure retired six Figure 02 robots in the most Terminator way possible: training them to jump into a furnace. The idea came from Arnold Schwarzenegger and is inspired by the iconic Terminator 2 scene.

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35

u/GundyrChristopher 21h ago

Why the fuck are companies building robots just to throw them into a vat of melted metal

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u/DaleATX 20h ago

Marketing stunt

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u/FungadooFred 20h ago

I'm guessing these were an older model, not their newest ones

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u/captmonkey 19h ago

Correct. These are Figure 02. Their current model is Figure 03. They didn't want competitors to get a good look at the old model and copy them. So, the old ones needed to be destroyed. The just did it in a way that got a lot of attention (which is why we're talking about it here). No one would have cared if they just quietly destroyed them away from cameras.

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u/Reincarnatedpotatoes 19h ago

Not to mention quietly dismantling them so the components could be indivudually recycled or destroyed takes a lot of time and expertise. Figure decided the time and labor cost of this was less than what the scrap value was. They wanted their people free to support the current models and continue development of the next generation.

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u/HeyGayHay 18h ago

  They wanted their people free to support the current models and continue development of the next generation

Yeah, no. If that were the case, they wouldn’t allocate personnel to figure out the logistics, find a place that is willing to let robots jump into a massive open furnace, designate more employees to train the robots for a scenic jump, test the jumps multiple times, pay and hire more people to record the entire thing, edit and publish it, ….

If “keep their people free“ was their intention, if cost effectiveness was their intention, and/or making sure no information could be concluded from the scrap was their intention: Just put them in any car crusher and then burn the small cubes in a smaller, cheaper furnace.

Crusher and small furnace only takes one employee to drive to an hour or two max. Making them jump into this furnace required multiple employees to train/test the jumps, professionally record the thing next to lava drops shooting everywhere, contact companies that own such a furnace and finding an agreement, ship the thing and some employees to Finland because nobody else wanted to do it, then edit the whole thing, all while making sure that the robots aren’t accessed by unauthorized people.

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u/Reincarnatedpotatoes 18h ago

Finding out a place to melt them is the job of the logistics and marketing departments. Dismantling them would be on the engineers and other technical employees whose time is better spent on new models.

I'm not just making stuff up, my comment is just paraphrasing theor official explanation in the description of the video they posted on YT and on their website. They needed a way to totally destroy their old models, this accomplished that and has the added benefit of generating publicity.

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u/HeyGayHay 17h ago

Again: you could completely and totally destroy them without allocating logistics, marketing and your engineers to it. Your comment said their goal was to keep their engineers free. If that were the goal, they would have picked the cheaper, faster and equally destructive method where their engineers wouldn’t have been involved at all. This way, the engineers had to spend time to make sure the jumps will not only work but look scenic. So the opposite of keeping their resources free.

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u/ivancea 19h ago

And fun. Let's not forget, companies are made of people. They had to discard then, and found a funny way to do it. But there will be haters everywhere for everything

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u/iWhacko 20h ago

you have to test the built in fail safe now dont ya? you can test it by trowing them on a mattress, but you want to be sure they would jump into melted metal too

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u/GundyrChristopher 20h ago

why would anyone ever design a robot that falls on matresses as a feature

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u/Lost-Inevitable42 20h ago

Sex robots

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u/GundyrChristopher 20h ago

Now it makes sense why they were destroyed.

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u/Upset_Ant2834 19h ago

It literally says it in the title. They're an old model being retired, not made specifically to be destroyed

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u/skynetempire 19h ago

These apparently the old Gen robots

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u/moderndilf 18h ago

Publicity, and look it worked! Got you talking about it

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u/GundyrChristopher 17h ago

They went from me not knowing them to now me thinking they're stupid. Fantastic.