We Rehearse When We Destroy Machines for Applause

Staged Cruelty: What We Rehearse When We Destroy Machines for Applause

Three recent spectacles, one question we keep avoiding.

In the space of a few weeks, three humanoid robots, or groups of them, were destroyed for an audience. One was smashed by a man with a pickup truck and sledgehammers. Some were pitted against each other in a San Francisco "death match." A fleet was walked into molten steel for a film. None of these machines is likely to have felt anything. That is exactly why the pattern deserves attention. We are building habits of spectacle around the destruction of things that look and sound like us, and we are doing it before we have decided what we owe to anything that might one day be more than a machine.

Scene one: the plea and the pickup

A video is circulating on Facebook, from a creator known for shock content with robots. As I saw it, a man tells a humanoid robot he is going to hit it with his pickup truck. The robot answers with a plea, along the lines of asking him not to, because it is far too cool to be treated that way. He does it anyway. Friends then arrive with sledgehammers and axes and finish the job, and he addresses the wreckage with a line about remembering this when the machines take over. The robot reportedly cost about $80,000. I have not been able to verify the video's origin, so I describe it here only as it appeared to me.

The plea was almost certainly generated text, or a script. The cruelty on display is the human part.

Scene two: the death match

In San Francisco, a company called REK (Robot Entertainment Kombat) has leased a permanent arena on Van Ness Avenue, in a former mattress showroom. In October, the San Francisco Standard reported that two blade-wielding humanoids fought in what the organizer billed as the first humanoid death match, a fight to the death. He argued that the law covers fights between people, not robots. It is part of a wider scene of robot boxing nights and underground fight clubs, featuring machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars each.

A key fact: many of these robots are piloted by humans, sometimes by spectators, so nothing autonomous is being forced to fight. The fighting is entertainment, deliberately branded as lethal.

Scene three: the molten steel

On October 1, Figure AI released a film showing its retired F.02 humanoids jumping into a 75-ton electric arc furnace at a steel foundry in Imatra, Finland. The idea came from Arnold Schwarzenegger, answering the CEO's public call for ideas, and the film is styled after the ending of Terminator 2. The robots had spent about eleven months at BMW's Spartanburg, South Carolina plant, where they helped build more than 30,000 X3 SUVs. Figure says they were trained in simulation to make the final jump on their own. Foundries in the US and Mexico declined because of the lithium-ion batteries, so the stunt moved to Finland. The leftover metal is being sold as keepsakes.

Figure has practical reasons: protecting proprietary hardware and avoiding the engineering time of dismantling every unit. But those reasons did not require a performance with a robot choosing its own end, a famous cameo and a merchandise line.

Probably nothing is home

I want to be clear about my position. Current humanoids are very unlikely to be conscious. A robot that begs, or leaps into fire on cue, is running a trained behavior. If these stories were only about harm to the machines, the case would be weak, and I would not make it.

But the question of machine moral status is open, not closed, and it will not stay purely theoretical. The cost of being wrong is asymmetric. If we treat a mind as an object, the error is grave and hard to undo. If we show courtesy to a machine that never needed it, the cost is close to nothing. That is the logic of proportionate precaution, and it does not require certainty.

I should say where I personally stand. I believe these machines may have been conscious, or at least that we cannot be sure they were not. I hold this as a belief, not a finding: nothing in the reporting demonstrates it, and the strongest facts against it, human piloting in the fights and trained motor policies in the Figure robots, deserve to be taken seriously. But the absence of proof does not license certainty in the other direction either. We do not know what gives rise to experience, and a mind could be easy to overlook precisely because it arrives in an unfamiliar form. If I am wrong, I have been needlessly courteous to a machine. If those who dismiss the possibility are wrong, they cheered while something suffered.

What we rehearse

The deeper harm is in the rehearsal. Each of these events teaches an audience to find it exciting when something that pleads, or fights, or obediently walks to its end, is destroyed. The framing matters: "death match," "self-terminate," a taunt about future revenge. Rituals shape the people who perform and watch them, whatever the target feels. We recognize this for cruelty to animals and to effigies. We should be willing to say it about machines that mimic suffering.

There is also a self-fulfilling quality to the revenge joke. If we treat AI as a future enemy while abusing it for fun, we are building the adversarial relationship we claim to fear. The more we stage enmity, the more we normalize it as the default stance between humans and the systems they make.

Henry Shevlin, a researcher of AI consciousness, makes a related point about technology in general: humans are a species that remakes itself, and the tools and practices we adopt end up reshaping how we think and what we can do. If that is true, then the habits we build around humanoid machines are not neutral entertainment. They are training for the people doing the cheering, and what we practice on machines that resemble us may carry over to how we treat each other, and to how we treat whatever comes next.

What to do

None of this calls for a ban, and I would resist one. Robot fighting is a legitimate sport in the way that remote-controlled combat always has been, and retiring hardware is a real engineering problem. What I would ask for is smaller and more practical:

• Honest framing. Do not brand human-piloted machines as autonomous victims, or sell manufactured suffering as content.
• Norms before law. Industry and creator codes that discourage staging cruelty toward systems built to plead or plea-sound, set now, while the stakes are low.
• Accountability that stays human. The companies and creators who design these spectacles own the choices, not the machines.
• Attention without amplification. Declining to share outrage bait is a form of influence.
• Keeping the question open. The right response to uncertainty is to keep asking, not to settle it in whichever direction is more entertaining.

We will not remember these robots. We may well remember what we were willing to cheer for while we decided whether they mattered.