The new face of Fordism
US robotics company Figure, which is developing humanoid robots to fill a growing labor shortfall in certain areas of the economy, has announced an agreement with BMW to deploy several of its Figure 01 robots at the German carmaker’s sole US plant, at Spartanburg, South Carolina, where it assembles about 1,500 X- and XM-series vehicles a day and currently employs about 11,000 people.
So far, few details on how many robots or what kind of jobs they will carry out have been given, beyond: “they will be integrated into manufacturing processes, including body shop, sheet metal and warehousing over the next 12 to 24 months, after being trained to perform specific tasks.” In other word, proof of concept for general purpose tasks.
BMW aims to rival Tesla, whose Optimus robot is already being used in its factories. Automakers such as Honda, makers of the well-known and now retired Asimo, or Hyundai, which acquired Boston Dynamics, have been experimenting with humanoid robots to perform repetitive and dangerous work on assembly lines for years, even before the generative algorithm explosion, and they argue that the most…
