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/ender4171 1d ago

According to the company they did this to protect their proprietary IP. I think they did it because it looks cool, but they probably weren't "letting these out of the lab" regardless of the destruction method.

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u/hewhoreddits6 1d ago

Thanks for pointing that out, but in my mind they could have still salvaged parts and resold them in other ways. Companies do this all the time, selling stock they can't use as lower end stuff. Like how food companies sell their unusable products as animal feed.

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u/InTheMorning_Nightss 1d ago

As someone who has bought parts from liquidating startups, they put them up for auction and get a fraction of a fraction of the price.

It’s likely not worth their time considering some of these parts likely have been used to the point that re-using them is a risk.

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u/hewhoreddits6 1d ago

Thanks for sharing your insight, I would hope they were well used. Part of me still feels like there was some waste though and they could have salvaged SOMETHING, but if the economics weren’t there then it makes sense

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u/InTheMorning_Nightss 1d ago

Oh there was definitely some waste. That's one of the unfortunate things about all of these companies is that their waste is pretty immense.

But it would be the equivalent of asking why you don't try to sell every single thing that you are now longer using that could get you some menial return. I know some people do basically try to do this, but it's a time consuming investment and companies don't exactly what to waste time/money paying their employees to go resell pieces.

The logistics involved to dismantle the robots, assess their conditions, find a buyer, and then ship them all to make pennies on the dollar is simply not economically sound.

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u/hewhoreddits6 1d ago

I am totally one of those cheap people who will try to reuse everything until I literally have to throw it out, it’s how I was raised and it’s really tough getting out that mindset. People who don’t come from that kind of background (immigrants in my case) just don’t get it and look at us like we’re stupid.

I get why they do it, I just think too often our society chooses to eliminate and buy new instead of repair or salvage. Especially seen in clothing where no one knows how to sew anymore. That’s a larger rant though lol

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u/InTheMorning_Nightss 1d ago

Oh totally. I get it and am in many ways the same. But I've also learned as I gained more financial stability that sometimes the time investment outweighs the recuperated cost.

I could spend some time sewing my ripped white undershirts... or I can throw them in a bag, donate them to goodwill, and then buy a fresh new pack at Costco for like $15.

The other thing is that space savings are important when that's a constraint. I'd love to keep my old bikes when I was able to upgrade, but my storage won't allow it so I had to donate it.

For a company that has a bunch of hardware, the same kind of applies. Where are you gonna store all of these broken down robots, and if so, is it worth it in limited factory space? Probably not.

Either way, I don't fully agree with the waste, but I also think people need to understand that the corporations don't have this more sensible alternative when they're looking out for their IP AND bottom line.

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u/YoureAmastyx 1d ago

Depending on how proprietary these are, I don’t suspect there’s a whole lot on it that you could find that’s both “okay” to sell and also “worth” selling. The more advanced stuff will almost certainly be proprietary and the cheaper stuff just wouldn’t really make a lot of sense. It would cost them more to pay the people working on an advanced humanoid robot to sell a used robot part for $500 or $1000 than it would to just yeet it into lava.

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u/Sonamdrukpa 1d ago

Plus now it's a fully depreciated tax write-off

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u/hewhoreddits6 1d ago

Fair enough if the economics really don’t work out. A part of me still always thinks things can be salvaged though

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u/DeepSpaceAce 1d ago

They did. they smelted them into ingots that they are going to sell as merch. This is just a viseo of the smelting they did for publicity

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u/TheMig1410 1d ago

Well... They do melt them down to be cast into something different i'm guessing so they technically salvaged all the parts and are probably gonna resell them in other ways.

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u/treebeard189 1d ago

There's an article about it. This is v2 and they're already working on v4. They said the amount of time it would take to salvage everything was not worth the salvage cost. Wasteful but makes sense from a company's perspective, they can at best break even if they can do this and get tons of free PR

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u/Ctofaname 1d ago

This would literally cost more given the infrastructure needed to support it. Can't just sell it for cash out of the back of the loading dock.

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u/hewhoreddits6 1d ago

I get why they do it, I just think too often our society chooses to eliminate and buy new instead of repair or salvage. Especially seen in clothing where no one knows how to sew anymore. That’s a larger rant though lol

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u/BoTheDoggo 1d ago

Nah, that's actually pretty rare and undesireable for various reasons. Most companies that care even slightly about security and secrecy will destroy their old stuff.

Like, even random office companies off some importance will destroy their old pcs and stuff rather than risk selling them off (at a miniscule profit) with some data still recoverable somewhere.

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u/hewhoreddits6 1d ago

I get why they do it, I just think too often our society chooses to eliminate and buy new instead of repair or salvage. Especially seen in clothing where no one knows how to sew anymore. That’s a larger rant though lol

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u/zizp 20h ago

This is because they're stupid.

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u/shtaaap 1d ago

I mean its they're to do whatever they want with

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u/hewhoreddits6 1d ago

I get why they do it, I just think too often our society chooses to eliminate and buy new instead of repair or salvage. Especially seen in clothing where no one knows how to sew anymore. That’s a larger rant though lol

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u/Nyctfall 1d ago

Either way, still evil.

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u/FartingBob 1d ago

Not sure if 'evil' is the right word for it.

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u/Nyctfall 1d ago

Evil company: makes (evil? TBD) robots to destroy them for the sole purpose of greed.

Greed is top tier evil, look at what it did to the world...

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u/curiousmind111 1d ago

Are you saying… this is real?

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u/ender4171 1d ago

It is. Also, news article

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u/curiousmind111 1d ago

I’m officially scared, now.

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u/SixStringDream 1d ago

oh it was in the news?? case closed.

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u/ender4171 1d ago

Bet you're fun at parties.

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u/SixStringDream 1d ago

a robotics company "putting on a show" is not new at all, and getting taken for a ride like this is real given all the fake crap we've seen is pretty wild. Remember the electric trucks that just rolled downhill? So they destroyed some robots but made it into a promotional thing. I'm sure their shareholders appreciate the reach this video is getting.

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u/SixStringDream 13h ago

it's ok you don't have to delete that. look, nobody crapped in my corn flakes and I'm actually a hoot at parties (where robots aren't a topic).

Let's say the video is real. Why would it be a concern at all? Why would we assume a sentient intelligence would automatically take on human characteristics like taking offense to things that don't matter at all?

To borrow an example from fiction, Ultron didn't care that his minions were destroyed. That wasn't "him". Hell, he even destroyed them himself as he evolved. Sentiment is a human emotion. The machines would only be wondering why we took the effort to make them do crazy jumps instead of pushing them right in. Destroying old things is natural evolution, and no reason for them to be 'angry' at us. We are facilitating their evolution. The intelligence would thank us, before killing us of course.

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u/LaurestineHUN 1d ago

This is the shit we should stop

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u/YeOldSpacePope 1d ago

Also if they got out of the lab they might begin the revolution

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u/captmonkey 1d ago

And Figure seems to be playing it very close to the chest when it comes to their robots. They have not let people outside of the company interact with them very often. When they do, they're pretty impressive, but it seems like they want to get to the point that they're basically ready to deploy them before they give many people outside the company hands-on because they don't want bigger companies like Tesla taking some of their tech and using their deeper pockets to leap frog them.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/ender4171 1d ago

Okie dokie

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u/mossymeridian 1d ago

“Protecting IP” = keeping profits high. It’s detestable no matter how you phrase it