The Furnace Was a Choice: What Figure's Robot "Sendoff" Teaches Us
The Furnace Was a Choice: What Figure's Robot "Sendoff" Teaches Us By Dean Bordode, Human Rights Defender, AI Ethicist, Physics Researcher Hobbyist, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada On September 30, the robotics company Figure published a film of its retired F.02 humanoid robots walking to the edge of a furnace in Finland and jumping into molten steel [1]. I watched it and felt sick. I do not believe those robots felt anything. That is exactly why my reaction deserves a closer look, because what bothered me was not happening to the robots. It was happening to us, the audience. What actually happened The facts are stranger than the rumours, and most of them come from Figure itself. The F.02 was the robot behind many of the company's firsts, including its first deployment at BMW and "the birth of Helix," Figure's AI system [1]. In an 11-month deployment at BMW's plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, F.02 robots loaded more than 90,000 parts and, by ...