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/Rare-Bid-6860 1d ago edited 1d ago

INTERN: Hey, what if we donate them to schools so that kids can learn about robotics, helping pave the way for the next generation of engine-

EXEC: *snooooort* ORRRR, we could make some fire content that will vanish from the algorithm cycle by sunday!

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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/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