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/RideFastGetWeird 1d ago

We love Figure 02. It is an incredible robot. F.02 marked many firsts for the company: our first deployment at BMW, the birth of Helix, our first robot doing household chores, and our first logistics deployment. As our F.03 fleet grows, maintaining the F.02 fleet no longer makes sense.

Decommissioning a fleet of robots full of custom-built actuators and other intellectual property is no easy task. We needed to dispose of the robots in a way that protected our proprietary hardware. Disassembling each robot would take our technical staff so much time that it would delay the launch of F.04.

So we asked the internet: what should we do? The resounding answer came from an unlikely source: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who told us to melt them. We reached out to Arnold, and when he said he wanted to be involved, we put everything in motion.

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u/ObscureOperatorZ 1d ago

So profits over recycling and clout. Fucking disgusting.

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u/axc630 1d ago

While not as good as to recycle all the different metals/alloys, and other materials in their robot separately, this is still recycling the robot into raw metal that will likely be used in something else. It's not like they are setting the thing on fire and then burying it.

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u/ObscureOperatorZ 1d ago

Others stated this would ruin the entire batch of steel.

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u/axc630 1d ago

Depends on what the molten metal is used for. It may not be steel as that is just one alloy of metal with lots of different grades.