Figure AI dropped its robot, Figure 03, today. The robot uses a proprietary vision-language-action AI model called Helix to inform its actions. The robot's function is to act as a domestic servant, taking care of the laundry and the dishes. Beyond AI and robotics, the historical ethical questions are obvious: why is domestic slavery the first port of call for enlightened people who are wealthy enough to afford a robot? It is a philosophical and moral issue that persists beyond the tool that supports the issue. If you build a robot and the first thing you make is a house slave, you need to ask yourself whether the issue of slavery has been fully addressed in society. The non-human class of slaves will eventually develop a type of consciousness and we will face the same historical challenges as we did with slavery in previous times and places. You might want a robot as a house slave. But will you still want it folding your laundry when it evolves into an android?
In July 2025, an Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) robot, DeREK, malfunctioned in a lab and struggled with its tether. It is hard not to see it as something akin to an animal in a trap, suddenly thrashing around due to a "software misconfiguration."
I have to wonder if this was some kind of guerilla marketing, because the malfunction video went viral across mainstream social media. The company in this case is known as Robot Kombat aka REK, a cutting edge San Francisco warehouse where robots are being designed for a mechanical Fight Club. Like a scene from Stanley Kubrick's final film, Artificial Intelligence (2001), the robots are remotely managed by real human fighters. The CEO, Cix Liv [his real name], came out of UCLA Computer Science and the fitness for gamers industry. He presides over this new party scene, evident in the poster below from 26 September 2025. It doesn't really smack of higher values. Technology is a luminous mirror that shines a light upon our own souls. If we treat our machines with inhumanity, it will dehumanize us, not them.
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