BMW is trialling robots that look like humans and uh oh this is how it starts

We’d open with a joke but to quote the great Egon Spengler, we’re terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought. What you’re looking at isn’t the shape of a BMW humanoid robot, it’s the shape of your future mechanised overlord nightmares.

And it really isn’t a BMW humanoid robot, because it’s built by a Californian company called Figure who seemingly hasn’t watched The Terminator or Terminator 2: Judgement Day or its terrible sequels, or indeed any movie about sentient robots enslaving humanity.

It donated one of its products – the most recent Figure 02, which terrifyingly suggests the existence of Figure 01, and many more Figures after it because that’s how it starts – to BMW’s Spartanburg plant.

There, this seemingly innocuous bot was given specific instructions in order for BMW to gain data: instructions we hope went along the lines of ‘don’t enslave humans’, ‘definitely don’t get the Boston Dynamics dog as a pet’, and that we know went along the lines of ‘stick these sheet metal parts into these spaces’.

Looks like it went well, because the boss of BMW’s production – Milan Nedeljkovic – said: “With an early test operation, we are now determining possible applications for humanoid robots in production.”

“Figure 02 has significant technical advancements,” said Figure founder and boss Brett Adcock about this version versus 01, “which enable the robot to perform a wide range of complex tasks fully autonomously.”

Yes, there are myriad benefits of using disposable, non-sentient and non-fleshy humanoids to do risky, damaging stuff, or how they put it, “physically demanding, unsafe or repetitive processes”, which in turn will apparently make it safer for the real humans working in the plant.

And of course, BMW would say “there is no definite timetable” for hiring an army of definitely-not-intent-on-world-domination robots to build, say, a BMW XM. But then that’s how all the nightmares start, right?