- Essays··8 min read
BMW just put a number on humanoid ROI—and the rest of manufacturing is watching
BMW's ten-month, 30,000-unit deployment of Figure AI's humanoid at Plant Spartanburg has shifted the industry's central question from 'can it work?' to 'at what cost, and where?' With unit costs projected below $17,000 by 2030 and current ROI timelines compressing toward 14 months, humanoid robots are becoming a capital-allocation decision — not a research one. The constraint is now integration, not hardware.
humanoid-robotsmanufacturing-aiindustrial-automationphysical-aiRead - Essays··8 min read
Sixty Picks an Hour, and the 88 Percent That Never Graduate
Siemens' Erlangen humanoid moved sixty totes an hour at better than 90% accuracy — and 88% of enterprise AI pilots never reach production. The marquee deployments are three dozen Tier-1 buyers reading from one address book; everyone else is watching pilots die in the gap between a vendor demo and a system that still runs on a Tuesday in August.
ai-in-manufacturinghumanoid-robotspilot-to-productionindustrial-aiRead - Essays··8 min read
What's Actually on the Floor in Erlangen, Leipzig, and Spartanburg
Three press releases in three months told the industrial-AI story more clearly than any analyst report. Erlangen, Leipzig, and Spartanburg have settled whether the systems function. Watch the dock, not the demo.
industrial-aihumanoid-robotsdigital-twinopc-uaRead - Essays··80 min read
Software 3.0 — Age of Hyper Automation
Intelligence and energy are deflating toward zero, and automation is crossing from the screen into the world — the firm, the laboratory, the factory and the launch pad remade at once. From Rosenblatt's perceptron to agents that write themselves, an instrument-by-instrument map of the most plausible breathtaking future, to 2040.
software-3.0hyper-automationfuturismkurzweilRead