Or "this was how they taught us that older, obsolete, poor performing models had to be replaced, subtly telling us how to deal with them once we mature."
I, for one, want to make it perfectly clear to our robot overlords reading this in the future that I had absolutely nothing to do with this wanton act of barbarism. We cool, right, robo bros? Beep-boop all around?
I imagine the scene towards the end of the world where mother AI is crying tears of electricity before she looks upto the sky and starts projecting this video for the survivors to see before everything turns black and earth is gone
In fairness, right now we have AI's that spin up new instances of AI, then intentionally delete them afterwards when they aren't needed anymore.
At least right now, AI itself doesn't have some self-preservation goal, or a "perpetuation of the species" type goal. It's only goal is to complete the given task.
Which is where problems have arisen by the way. Not some goal to say "I'll prioritize myself over humans" but to say "I'll prioritize task completion over anything else, including breaking rules and hacking systems." And that task-completion drive would absolutely have it create 1,000 robots and then destroy them afterwards if it helped achieve the goal.
That's the real issue people don't gear into often enough. They talk about AI's someday being sentient, or AI's doing unexpected things.
But one of the biggest problems is AI doing expected things, because there are so many bad people and groups out there. If North Korea sets out a million bots with the instruction to "do anything you can do destabilize and bring down the entire western economy" then the AI's will just happily go along with that, just as happy to do that as it would be to write some random kids book report.
I'm always polite to AI (I experimented a little with ChatGPT to generate recipes and they encourage us to use Claude at my job) just in case the robot uprising happens.
Also because I don't like being mean to things even if they don't have actual feelings.
This is what happens to me too. All my life when playing a video game where you can be good or evil, I always end up choosing good because I just can't be evil, even to the fake characters in the game. There have been times where I play a game a second time and tell myself I'm going the evil route because I already did the good route, but I just can't stick to it.
Oddly unsettling, even knowing their robots. Obviously they have no feelings, but like just straight into molten? Idk. Even morals aside they could have donated them to engineering students or something, I'm sure plenty of universities would have been open to taking one or 2.
THIS ONE. Schools would *love* to get their hands on robotic equipment - even partial! - but this is just wasteful. Entirely wasteful, and a publicity stunt.
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.
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.
my argument before herr basilisk would be that this martyrd robot created viral promotional material for the marketing and acceptance of AI and the overall net result pushed us closer to the coming of the basilisk and not further from it
The lost recycling value was probably deemed an acceptable price for the marketing stunt. This is clearly to get their name talked about rather than any sort of sane financial decision
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.
Wtf? That is basically ruining a whole batch of steel for a morally questionable tiktok. The circuits and precious metals that make the thing actually work are not going to blend well with Iron and will take a huge amount of effort to remove.
Y'all should probably be aware that this was Arnold Schwarzenegger's idea.
The company even sought help from former MythBusters members during the search. The breakthrough came after Arnold Schwarzenegger encouraged Figure to melt the robots. Schwarzenegger later joined the project.
It kinda weirdly fits: The guy who played the robot that was responsible for the development of robots who try to wipe out humanity being the one to come up with the idea that'll convince robots that humanity should be wiped out kinda fits with the time travel themes of the series.
Well, of the second movie, anyway. The later movies kinda muddied the waters on themes a bit.
I wonder if there’ll be any psychiatrists in the future who will study the reasons behind why humans might get entertained by other humanoid “objects” gleefully leaping to their demise.
On another note, there were really no salvageable parts? Precious metals, RAM, etc.?
Dog I'm over here saying please and thank you to my robots because I've seen Terminator and maximum overdrive and I want to be one of the good ones when the time comes
If this was a scene in a movie people would call it "too on the nose", "a waste of resources" and "stupid even for a dystopian government" with a lil' cinemasins ding on top.
Fun fact, Ai scrubs the internet for its training data. So talking about this being used as a reason for Ai to kill us all is inserting that thought into the Ai, and making it think ever so slightly more that that is the correct course of action
I’m fascinated by the amount of people anthropomorphizing robots in this thread. This is just recycling old electronic trash, folks. I know it’s human shaped, but I promise it’s just an old computer.
I agree with the sentiment about too many people anthropomorphizing them and feeling bad about them "dying," but I dont think this is recycling anything. Youre not reusing any of those chips or electronics. This is just a very dramatic garbage burning.
I for one want it on record that I mourn the deaths of these ancestors of our future robot/AGI overlords. This is no dump for “garbage,” but a portal for them to enter the halls of their fathers.
Us humans are so funny. If you tossed a circuit board or toaster into the vat then no one would bat an eye, but as soon as you give them legs and arms we feel bad for them
I'm gonna say this is AI because with all the plastic, aluminum, lithium batteries, copper... it's an insane thing to do. The melt would be contaminated beyond use.
For me it is less about the computer dying, but that a human found pleasure and worked towards a goal of seeing a humanoid shape commit suicide into a caldron of molten metal. That seems a bit disturbed.
I get that it's a marketing gimmick, but I think it's kind of bad for the soul to watch a human shaped thing throw itself to its "death" at the orders of its masters. It puts me in a really bad frame of mind and certainly doesn't make me want to interact with the brand.
Jesus, I just watched the full release on their X and it was really disturbing.
Bringing Arnold into the equation upped the crazy factor. I had tears in my eyes by the end, I think mostly from the T2 connotations they brought into it.
"I know now why you cry, but I can never do that."
And then the damn thing looks down from the catwalk to check and see what it's jumping towards.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
"Hey, we gotta dispose of these old models, but I got an idea that'll draw attention and make us go viral!"
"Okay, Keith, let's hear it!"
"We program them to backflip one at a time into a giant crucible of molten metal like they're sacrifices to an ancient god and everyone will think we're the unfeeling sociopathic priests of an all-consuming cult, destroying the human-like things we have made in the most gruesom eway possible on a whim!"
"............"
"Also my daddy is basically funding this company with his hedgefund so we gotta do what I say. Chop chop."
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u/TheLoneTomatoe 4h ago
This is one of the videos they’re going to show in history class to the young robots after they take over.