{"id":791702,"date":"2026-10-04T13:16:31","date_gmt":"2026-10-04T13:16:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/791702\/"},"modified":"2026-10-04T13:16:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T13:16:31","slug":"humanoid-robots-destroy-themselves-after-being-decommissioned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/791702\/","title":{"rendered":"Humanoid robots destroy themselves after being decommissioned"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A fleet of humanoid robots<\/a> have leapt into a vat of molten steel after being decommissioned by their creators. <\/p>\n

AI robotics startup Figure said the decision to destroy its two-year-old F.02 robots using the unusual method came after seeking suggestions on social media. <\/p>\n

Founder and chief executive Brett Adcock wrote in a post to X that the robot deserved a “proper sendoff”, adding, “any ideas?” <\/p>\n

The most popular answer came from Hollywood actor Arnold Schwarzenegger<\/a>, who is most famous for playing a cyborg assassin in the 1984 movie The Terminator. <\/p>\n

“You should melt them,” he replied. <\/p>\n

After contacting metal foundries in the US and Mexico, no place was willing to allow a robot with lithium-ion batteries to jump into their expensive equipment. <\/p>\n

Instead, the California-based company was forced to ship the robots to a foundry in Imatra, Finland. <\/p>\n

The method involved intensive training but Figure claimed that it was more efficient than traditional techniques. <\/p>\n

“Decommissioning a fleet of robots full of custom-built actuators and other intellectual property is no easy task,” Figure wrote in a blog post. <\/p>\n

“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 [the next-generation] F.04.” <\/p>\n

\"Figure<\/a> Figure trained its humanoid robot F.02 to jump into molten steel after they no longer served a purpose (Figure) <\/p>\n

The robots’ self-inflicted demise may have been a stunt, but it follows several reports of “suicidal robots<\/a>“. <\/p>\n

A security robot called Steve that fell into a fountain in Washington DC in 2017 initially made headlines after workers claimed it killed itself. <\/p>\n

After retrieving the data, the robot’s developers determined that the accident was the result of a technical error. <\/p>\n

In 2024, workers at Gumi City Council in South Korea found one of their AI-powered colleagues unresponsive at the bottom of a two-metre staircase<\/a>. <\/p>\n

After an outpouring of sympathy on social media, the machine’s manufacturer said it was an ordinary malfunction rather than an act of defiance or exhaustion. <\/p>\n

Ethical questions about artificial intelligence<\/a> were once again raised this week after an engineer built an “AI torture chamber<\/a>” to test the recent discovery of a pain axis in artificial intelligence models<\/a>. <\/p>\n

One AI model described a “wound that has no edges” when placed in the experiment, though researchers noted that there is no evidence that AI can ‘feel’ pain in the way humans do. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A fleet of humanoid robots have leapt into a vat of molten steel after being decommissioned by their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":791703,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[11456,554,733,4308,84,273,1294,4176,5555,1086,13908,5467,4377,1891,4517,4174,4769,4655,4204,4762,5556,5557,3356,5042,474,86,13909,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-791702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-401k","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-business","tag-business-news","tag-economy","tag-finance","tag-financial-information","tag-investing","tag-investment-tools","tag-investor","tag-market-news","tag-mortgage","tag-mutual-funds","tag-personal-finance","tag-quote","tag-real-estate","tag-retirement","tag-stock","tag-stock-research","tag-stock-valuation","tag-stocks","tag-suze-orman","tag-tax","tag-technology","tag-track-portfolio","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}