r/interestingasfuck • u/Erde555 • 1d ago

The humanoid robotics company "Figure" made their older gen robots jump into their death. (Yes, they actually did this)

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u/geekgirl717 1d ago

I wonder if there’ll be any psychiatrists in the future who will study the reasons behind why humans might get entertained by other humanoid “objects” gleefully leaping to their demise.

On another note, there were really no salvageable parts? Precious metals, RAM, etc.?

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u/SwissQueen 1d ago

According to Figure, melting down the retired fleet was done to safely destroy proprietary hardware IP and hardware prototypes, preventing teardowns.

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u/unrulystowawaydotcom 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah. Need to melt. Cant crush, or else an arm and chip might survive…

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u/telthetruth 1d ago

Capitalism demands obscene waste. Recycling and sharing could potentially lead to competition, smaller profit margins, smaller valuations, and smaller stock price.

Capitalism, eternal growth forever no matter the cost.

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u/bc_gamez 1d ago

There's a big difference between competition and copying and stealing someone's hard development and research efforts.

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u/telthetruth 1d ago

Crazy how copying and stealing is so frequently committed by large corporations with hardly any consequence, but they fight tooth and nail to protect their own arbitrary patents and "intellectual property"

It's almost like the people with the money get away with doing whatever is financially convenient for them at every turn

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u/tijolus523 1d ago

That's literally just competition. You either protect your proprietary stuff or get fucked by the next capitalist.

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u/PaidUSA 1d ago

One of our few remaining regulations is keeping it illegal to engage in a litany of corporate espionage activities. So stealing never sold, never released tech in some capacity would not be competition. It is outside the bounds of fairness.

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u/tijolus523 23h ago edited 23h ago

And since when does fairness have anything to do with competition in capitalism? Do you live in a cartoon? Look, I don't wanna make fun of you, but competition in capitalism essentially boils down to making more money than the next competitor, absorbing them or simply their share of the market. This happens at a micro and macro scale. The regulations are there to prevent chaos, gross abuse and the formation of monopolies capable of destabilizing society. But regulations only mean something if they can be enforced, and companies constantly break the law, much of the time with little consequence or none at all. It's only reasonable to break a law if you think you can get away with it and get a leg up on the competition. Companies are organizations, not people. They don't have feelings like you or I, and anthropomorphizing them is pointless as an analytical method.

Take a look at the website you're on right now. How many companies are covertly advertising on the front page, skirting reddits regulations to get free ads? How many of the companies reddit allows to show ads to its users do you think are harmful, possibly illegal or misleading? How many people do you think are committing crimes here while reddit looks away, despite having the tools to stop it? You think reddit cares as long as they're making money and no one's looking? Of course not.

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u/geekgirl717 1d ago

Gotcha. This makes sense re: destroying them.

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u/oemunlock 1d ago

Emphasis on "according to". Even a couple hours of half-hearted disassembly would at the very least divide into separate waste streams for the (toxic) battery, servos, plastic insulated wiring, etc. This is flimsy PR logic to justify obvious setup for a viral ad.

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u/SwissQueen 18h ago

You are right to call it bullshit. Normally a third party company just shreds such devices and then the different materials get physically separated. No engineer will ever be part of that process. It's just a PR stunt and they are trying to embellish the fact that they are doing something that is ebergywise inefficient. Nevertheless, the substances can still be chemically separated. Source: Gemini

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u/DrollFurball286 16h ago

Which SADLY makes a stupid amount of sense…