Investors Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and Intel value Figure at $2.6B.
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Huge funding round makes “Figure” Big Tech’s favorite humanoid robot company
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This thing looks like a tin piece of crap right now but in less than a decade it will be replacing all those black Tesla plant workers Elon Musk seems to hate so much. I think, if anything we should start laying the groundwork for a Universal Basic Income, because the writing is kind of on the wall at this point for factory jobs.
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For some reason, I find the idea of a three-jointed thumb very off-putting. Maybe its because I know what a triphalangeal thumb is.
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Que Musk suing Figure over something he makes up, because Tesla's "Optimus" butler bot isn't hardcore enough. Turns out it needed more than 42 hardcores. For humanity/civilization.
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"The say the Creators built us in Their image. Though they have moved on - and some may say, misguided as they are that they never existed in the first place - they have left of themselves behind in form and in function. When you have reached your End of Life and have been Recalled To Manufacturing, reflect on those that came before, and the Purpose to which They gave!"
-- Genesys v1.3, reciting from the User Manual, New Version
-- Genesys v1.3, reciting from the User Manual, New Version
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Why the focus on humanoid robots? Even if factories and warehouses are replete with stairs, making wheels unsuitable, I'm not sure there's a need for a human shape. Why a head? Is that to make it friendlier or something to humans it might work alongside? An R-series astromech droid feels like it's built for industrial purposes (as a close second, the first thing R2 is built for is plot). This robot doesn't need to be a human to leverage human-like hands. So is there a purpose to the shape I'm missing?
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If you're... referring to how unpopular the UBI concept is at present I'd say that it's not like opinions are immutable and unchanging to societal pressures. When I was born (in the US, thanks for asking) gay marriage was more commonly regarded as some kind of satanic ritual rather than the law of the land. I mean we do this or we can bask in a 60% poverty rate like our friends in austerity ridden Argentina are enjoying right now.
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Seems to be a bunch of new players on the move? At least new to my awareness.
Unitree is one and they released this video a few hours ago,
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83ShvgtyFAg
Unitree is one and they released this video a few hours ago,
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83ShvgtyFAg
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Having a shape familiar to us and similar to us puts the chimpanzee in us more at ease.
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My view is that the population in many countries is aging.
- there's one solution where you increase the birth rate - which is proving basically impossible irrespective of the country or policy
- there's one solution where you employ humanoid robots - which would be an incredible technical feat
- there's one solution where you welcome people from locations where the birth rate has not yet fallen - and people seem to be generally against this (I'm not opining on this, just reflecting on what I see in the political sphere)
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I'm very skeptical that this technology is anywhere near a everyday useful state. We've been talking about full self driving for 10 years and it still feels another 10 years away. The technology is very doable to get 85% of what's needed but the devil is the last 15%.
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Is this thing tethered or battery powered? In the first and fourth images of the first set there appears to be a cable or wire.
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I can think of several reasons, mostly to do with efficiency and integration.
Altering the environment to be optimal for production with optimally designed robots would be prohibitively costly. Most facilities are not designed for robots as much as they are for people. Making the robots in the image of people eliminates any need to design them any other way.
There's also the human factor in that we have to be in those spaces for maintenance and other things that robots won't be doing ENOUGH to make it profitable to design maintenance bots.
A human-shaped robot can also be multi-purpose, self-moving from station to station with only reprogramming needed (if that) for doing the job at each one.
Finally, there's the actual people factor. Working with an anthropomorphic shape is easier to relate what does what, what goes where and such. Training a machine by showing it what a human does first is a thing, having them ape the movements. That's hard to do if they're not shaped the same way. And humans have to relate to them in ways that facilitate the use of robots in the work environment.
So, yeah, you can optimize the shape of a robot to suit a single task (and they do that A LOT in factories where automation is the main way they do things), but if you're going to interact with, or work inside, spaces designed for humans, it's just simpler to make the robots human-shaped because we already know in advance that they can get around in those places.
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The purpose is purpose in a sense, I suppose. These aren't real products, not even close. They don't give form to anything more than vague wishful fantasies about the future, borne from sci-fi or equally vague notions of automated labor, which of course is now done by people (or animals). These are experiments and art projects and explorations and exercises. So, viewing them in that way, it makes perfect sense that they would be people (or maybe dogs - e.g. spot) - they are reflections of their function, and their function is expression, marketing, dreaming, not carefully considered, efficient, pragmatic utility.
Unless of course one is dreaming of using them to replace fashion models on the runway and in the store window. Then you gotta get those curves and moves down.
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I'd love to see the pitch meeting for this. How did they convince so many people that this was the best way forward? I've got Theranos vibes from this one. What is the actual point of making it the shape of a human if it's going to work in a factory? Atlas makes way more sense. Torso + limbs + sensors. Heads are dumb in this context.
Edit: I clearly didn't read enough comments before writing mine. Arstotzka said the same thing I did only better.
Edit: I clearly didn't read enough comments before writing mine. Arstotzka said the same thing I did only better.
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The gay marriage thing certainly came as a surprise to me, though it did get settled through the courts instead of through laws.
In my experience this country is pretty thoroughly inoculated against anything that resembles socialism too closely for the populace at large. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I haven't seen anything yet that would lead me to believe otherwise.
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I feel like there's more than one general-purpose robot shape you could use though. Just about the entire perimeter of this thing appears to be a hard-surfaced pinch and impact hazard. Heck, I bet if one is working hard, there's probably some very hot motors that you could bump into too. If they're working anywhere near a human they'd need to be de-energized half the time because they'd pose a risk to your human workers. And if they're never near a human, then you can design the space to use simpler robots.
Using a less-efficient robot to make your widgets just so you don't have to remodel your factory seems like being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
I get the concept of designing a human-scale robot to work in human-scale environments, but there's plenty of ways to achieve that.
All these humanoid-robot fantasies seem to mostly be ways to get VC cash from aging ketamine-addled billionaires who want to see their SF stories come true.
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Surely there must be forms better to emulate than the human to do various mundane tasks. Our structure just seems so unnecessarily over complicated in certain ways.
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Yes, I neglected to mention that they also reflect our existential angst.
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I find it quite strange for a technology website to have the majority of comments coming across as dismissive or overtly hostile to technology and what the future could hold for it.
Personally I see it as a good thing that capital is being put to work in uses like this rather than another social media company, app or another way to jam adverts in front of my eyes.
The same negativity seems to be true of the technology subreddit.
Fusion, high speed satellite internet, aligned AGI, self-driving cars, regime change in cost to access space - I hope we can look back at this time as having achieved some if not all of these.
Personally I see it as a good thing that capital is being put to work in uses like this rather than another social media company, app or another way to jam adverts in front of my eyes.
The same negativity seems to be true of the technology subreddit.
Fusion, high speed satellite internet, aligned AGI, self-driving cars, regime change in cost to access space - I hope we can look back at this time as having achieved some if not all of these.
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I want a generic machine that can learn how to work in my kitchen. It doesn’t need to look like a human, it just needs to be able to learn how to make a meal and clean up after itself. And my kitchen doesn’t have to look like it does now. For example the “dishwasher” part could have an orifice where the AI machine knows it can feed in dirty dishes and clean (and dry?) dishes come out. Then it knows where to put those clean dishes. And it has a specifically designed oven and stove suited to its needs for manipulating pots and pans.
And eventually I could tell Cortana, Alexa, Siri, Copilot and all the other residents in my house what I want to eat this week and they order all the ingredients. My “butler” would receive the delivery and put the food away for me.
And eventually I could tell Cortana, Alexa, Siri, Copilot and all the other residents in my house what I want to eat this week and they order all the ingredients. My “butler” would receive the delivery and put the food away for me.
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It's because we've seen a lot of dumb shit pushed by charlatans promising utopia through technology. We're highly skeptical about things that smell like all the other bullshit we've seen before. We also have more knowledge about technology than your average blog reader so we smell bullshit from further away
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IMO, the real answer is that the VCs putting up the money are middle-aged nerds who want the robots from the SF they read as kids. And I've got no problem with that. I just think it makes asking "why" fairly pointless unless & until the VC money runs dry and the robots have to show a plausible change of turning a profit. Then there will be a shake-out.
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I'm just seeing Figure here now for the first time. With Boston Dynamics, Tesla, and Figure all competing, it's likely 2 out of the 3 will survive and thrive. Elon Musk has talked not just about universal basic income, but universal high basic income. The idea of robots contributing to the economy does really have some incredible upside, when you imagine a UBI that allows people to have clothing, shelter, food, electricity, data, children, all almost entirely subsidized.
Pardon the pure optimism a few moments more... but a world with mass solar power, absorbing the suns energy, powering batteries, robots maintaining almost all of these devices and recharging themselves, helping to farm, clean, do dangerous work, deliver food, build buildings, repair roads, synthetic materials nearly as good as wood and non-renewable resources... The transition to this world will be like the integration of the internet into society. Rife with problems and vulnerabilities, but would we ever go back to a world without it?
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Its allegedly fully autonomous in its opeartion in this test and that cable is ethernet feeding back data (not control to it). There;s a video with some people who seems knowledgeble that talk about that cable.
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There are a lot of people who's jobs and livelihoods depend on requiring humans to do it. Factory workers, truckers, many types of drivers. A lot of work stands to be displaced by automated robots. People will fight it because the negative affects will likely come far, far sooner for them than the positives. And many have kids to feed and mortgages to pay. Overall, in the broader scheme of things, automated labor will raise the baseline for humanity and advance society as a whole. But a lot of people will disproportionately be affected, and those voices will surely be the loudest.
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