Atlas vs Figure
Boston Dynamics’ Atlas now works without human help, advancing from choreographed stunts to genuine autonomy. Independence is vital, but lasting impact depends on scale. Atlas astonishes with agility and real-time decision-making, yet remains a prototype not built for mass deployment. Figure, by contrast, places scalability at the center of its strategy, unveiling its Helix system to perform repetitive logistics tasks and to be manufactured in numbers large enough to transform warehouses. The contest is not only to build robots that think and act alone but also to produce them at scale. Autonomy without scale is spectacle; scale without autonomy is stagnation. The companies that achieve both will define the next labor revolution, echoing the hidden machines described in previous post.
Atlas Autonomy Update | Figure on Scaling Helix
Kazimir Malevich, An Englishman in Moscow (detail), 1914. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Public domain.