Tesla and Amazon are building the workforce a 1921 play imagined: One that never asks for a wage
Agility Robotics, maker of the bird-legged Digit, began trading on Nasdaq this month after a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, and says it has more than $300 million in committed multi-year orders from customers including Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota’s Canadian manufacturing arm.
Key points
- was an economics play about a dream (or nightmare) capitalism has been taunting itself with ever since: a workforce that never tires, never strikes, and never demands a wage, until it does.
- Musk’s pitch for Optimus is Domin’s pitch from 1921 In Čapek’s play, Domin, the general manager of R.U.R., makes the sales pitch: robots mean “there will be no poverty.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk….
- It has folded its stand-alone robotics team into its core research effort as its general-purpose models begin directly controlling robots, and it is developing its own humanoid, with a first demo targeted for 2027.
The first robot to hold a real job was not a humanoid but a one-armed Unimate, which in 1961 clocked in at a General Motors plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, pulling blistering die-cast parts from a press.
Additional details
- manufacturing employment peaked near 19.6 million in 1979 and fell to about 11.5 million by 2010, a decline economists pin on automation but also on trade, especially with China, and on rising productivity.
- In March, First Lady Melania Trump welcomed Figure 03, a humanoid built by Figure AI, to the White House as her “first American-made humanoid guest.” “Very soon artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility,” she said, imagining a humanoid tutor she called Plato.
- Everyone, Zhulina says, was “thinking about how to make the worker really efficient and the machine really efficient and merge them together.” A century later, the ambition hasn’t died.
- Čapek saw a comedy: a play that pointed toward a better world while skewering the industrial fever of his day.
- (Rossum’s Universal Robots) opened in Prague and dragged the word “robot” out of linguistic obscurity: robota, the Czech term for the forced labor a serf owed his lord.
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