The Who’s Who of AI just chipped in to fund humanoid robot startup Figure

If you thought blue collar jobs were safe from AI, think again. Robotics startup Figure aims to replace millions of workers with its humanoid automatons and has just received $675 million in funding to accelerate development. The Series B funding round, announced on Thursday, includes contributions from Microsoft, OpenAI, …

[HuBo]

Genius!

Let's build human-looking robots that can do the things that we're physionomically well-adapted for, so that we (humans) now only have to do those things that we're really not designed for at all (and hate to do)! That's $675 million really well spent!

"it's going to require billions of dollars"

I stand corrected!

[Aleph0]

Robots are coming for the dirty jobs

Yeah, dirty environments are notoriously the ideal place to put expensive delicate automatons in. /s

Call me when they can go into city sewers to dislodge fatbergs...

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Re: Robots are coming for the dirty jobs

It would last longer than I would.

[Neil Barnes]

nor any roles that require inflicting harm on humans

Like making them unemployed?

[DS999]

Honestly 16% of human speed is not a problem

If they were affordable enough, you just have more of them.

If you figure they operate nearly 24x7 (I'll assume they have fast charging so minimal "coffee breaks") so they do the work of four 40 hour per week employees that's maybe $200K/year including employee health insurance and so forth. But they're 1/6 of the speed so down to $33K/yr. If they last six years including warranty/repair that's $200K. Betting they cost more than that, but if the next version works at 50% of human speed and operates untethered and cost less than $500K Amazon would buy as many as they can get.

Their best feature in Bezos' mind would be that they won't try to form a union!

[DJO]

Re: Honestly 16% of human speed is not a problem

"Tethered"

This is not for control or safety, it's for power. With current or projected foreseeable battery technology it will be impossible to build a self contained humaniform robot that'll be able to run for more than an hour or so between recharges, (unless you decide to go nuclear).

[Dave 126]

Re: Honestly 16% of human speed is not a problem

> With current or projected foreseeable battery technology it will be impossible to build a self contained humaniform robot that'll be able to run for more than an hour or so between recharges,

That's not an insurmountable problem in a warehouse situation - use swappable batteries.

[DJO]

Re: Honestly 16% of human speed is not a problem

In most "warehouse situations" a humaniform robot offers no advantages over an autonomous fork lift or ceiling track for grabby robots to whizz around on.

Better to design the process so a machine can do it than to design a machine to do a job in the most inefficient way possible.

[DS999]

Re: Honestly 16% of human speed is not a problem

The point of using humanform robots is that they can work in the warehouse, they can load trucks, they can ride along with the trucks and drop off stuff at customer's houses, etc. They are far more flexible than a solution designed to do only one thing like an autonomous fork lift or grabby robot hands whizzing around on ceiling tracks.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how you enable a server only rogue AI to gain access to the physical world :-(

"At that speed, Terminator jokes are redundant – doubly so, in fact, as Figure CEO Brett Adcock’s “Master Plan" states the company won’t "place humanoids in military or defence applications, nor any roles that require inflicting harm on humans.""

Yeah right. If there were ever a very capable AI to be developed that was "completely perfectly safe by existing only in servers that could be switched off with the flip of a switch" and went rogue, then it just needs to infect one of those slow robots with limbs and tactile hands. Then the AI can use the very slow unarmed bot to make some rather more advanced and military capable ones. Sigh! Idiots!

[DS999]

Re: That's how you enable a server only rogue AI to gain access to the physical world :-(

Being chased by a terminator that moves at 1/6th human speed (and I'll be generous and assumes that means 1/6 human walking speed and it can't run) would be pretty awful in a post apocalyptic world where you had no powered vehicles. Assuming it can't lose track of you you'd have to be constantly on the move to keep away from it, because even if you walked four hours every day you wouldn't widen the gap!

[MrMerrymaker]

Re: That's how you enable a server only rogue AI to gain access to the physical world :-(

I once had a dream like that. Wherever you are - on a flight - the knowledge that thing thing is coming to you. No matter what barriers you try to place in between, it's coming.

You eventually stop moving and get complacent. Maybe in a mountain village, Eze near Nice..

You half kid yourself you've escaped it, but you see it shambling slowly up the hill one foggy morning

[DS999]

Re: That's how you enable a server only rogue AI to gain access to the physical world :-(

Seems like an island might be a good escape, it may have trouble walking along the ocean bottom. Or alternatively, live on a boat. Unless it can also operate a boat, all it could is walk on the sea floor until it was under you, but a terminator would be far too heavy to reach the surface unless it had prepared ahead with something it could inflate to carry it.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

For older nerds, only. . .

"See Figure 1."

Extra credit if you know what an SPR is.

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think that at some point Amazon and Jeff Guppyface realize that when you take away everyone's job, there will be nobody to buy your dog food.