Inside Meta’s push to put robots to work in data centers

[supersquirrel@lemmy.ca]

“More and more of our customers are telling us ‘we want to run our data centers using humanoid [robots]’ because you can run them at higher temperatures, in the dark, and all these things,” says Paul Golding, who oversees so-called physical intelligence at the chipmaker Analog Devices.

...

In Altoona, Meta worker group chats have taken on a demoralized tone, “saying we’re all going to be gone in a few years anyway because of the robots,” a person familiar with the discussions says. Even if adoption of robots proves slower than anticipated, some worry the quality of jobs available is trending downward. Two of the workers say that Meta is developing AI software and other technologies that they believe will allow it to hire lower-skilled—and thus, lower-paid—workers and centralize some roles in areas like Denver, Colorado, that are more financially advantageous to the company.

“They no longer want people who can think independently, come up with creative solutions, or perform complex troubleshooting,” one Meta data center worker says. “They want ‘smart hands,’ people who are just capable enough to follow AI instructions and not mess anything up.”

Remember, it never mattered whether the technology could replace human workers, it just mattered that we could be convinced we could possibly be replaced by them... at which point we could safely be devalued by the ruling class without it being "political".

This was always a war on the basic worth of a human being, understand it as that first and foremost... and as a speculative and "exciting" technology second.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/inside-metas-push-to-put-robots-to-work-in-data-centers/