As Dartmouth men’s basketball players move toward forming the first labor union in college sports, a majority of Americans say they are against college athletes unionizing — though younger respondents are more supportive.
A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that most adults, 55%, believe NCAA athletes should not be permitted to form unions that would allow them as employees to collectively bargain with their schools.
But younger Americans, Democrats, and Independents are more open to unionization. About 6 in 10 adults under the age of 45 support allowing college athletes to form unions. That drops to 36% among those between the ages of 45-59 and 23% of adults ages 60 and older.
Across party lines, 56% of Democrats and about half of Independents say athletes should be permitted to form unions. Only 23% of Republicans are supportive.
In a recent interview with Fox News, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, a former major college football coach and a harsh critic of unions in general, said athletes unionizing would “absolutely kill college sports.”
“You know, the last time I looked, they’re not employees. These students are student-athletes. And if you want the federal government involved and ruin something, you try to make the student-athletes employees,” said Tuberville, who has sponsored a college sports bill that would block employee status.
NCAA President Charlie Baker and other college sports leaders have been lobbying Congress for several years, asking for a federal law to regulate the way athletes can be compensated for the use of their names, images, and likenesses.
Tuberville and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia have sponsored one of several bills addressing NIL and other college sports reforms that have been put forth in both the House and Senate over the past four years. None have gotten any traction, with lawmakers focused on more pressing matters.
More recently, the emphasis from college sports leaders has shifted to NCAA antitrust protections that would prevent athletes from being deemed employees, thanks to looming lawsuits.
Baker and others contend the vast majority of the 1,100 NCAA member schools could not afford to treat their athletes as employees and would sponsor fewer teams if athletes were categorized this way.
According to the AP-NORC poll, 55% of non-white adults support college athletes being permitted to form unions. Only 34% of white adults say that unions should be permitted for college athletes.
“This country is not based on unions, but when unions got started, it secured everybody’s position in whatever their profession was, so to speak, especially the blue collars,” said 62-year-old Eric McWilliams, a Black man from Pennsylvania who’s been a part of a union and participated in the poll. “These college athletes aren’t making millions of dollars like the pros are. They have nothing really to fall back on. If they get injured, it’s over.”
Last month, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled Dartmouth’s men’s basketball players qualified for employee status, paving the way for team members to vote if they it wanted to join a union.
On March 5, the players voted 13-2 to join Service Employees International Union Local 560, which already represents some Dartmouth workers. The school has asked for a review — essentially appealing the regional director’s initial ruling — which could result in a lengthy process to determine if Dartmouth will ever be required to negotiate with the players.
Still, it was a significant milestone for those who have been advocating for some — if not all — college athletes to be recognized as employees and receive a greater share of the revenue that college football and basketball generate for schools and conferences that compete at the highest levels.
The media and marketing rights for the NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament, which begins next week, generated $945 million in revenue for the association and its member schools last year.
“Now it’s time for the colleges to stop wasting their time and money fighting athletes in court and lobbying Congress to roll back athletes’ rights, and instead start negotiating with athletes on revenue-sharing, health and safety protections, and more,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said.
The survey found that 53% of U.S. adults say colleges and universities with major athletic programs should provide athletes with a share of any revenue received from broadcast rights. However, less than half support giving athletes additional spending money, a salary, or exemptions from certain academic courses that they need to graduate.
“I think that really the credit towards progress has always gone to athletes,” said Ramogi Huma, the executive director of the advocacy group the National College Players Association, which has pushed for college athletes in revenue-generating programs to be deemed employees. “This is brick by brick by brick.”
Huma helped organize a labor movement among Northwestern football players in 2015 that started similarly to the one at Dartmouth, with a regional NLRB director ruling the players could vote to join a union. The initial ruling was eventually dismissed.
In the Dartmouth case, the players appeared to be acting on their own, though college sports leaders, including Baker, have said repeatedly the majority of athletes they interact with do not want to be employees of their schools.
Isaac Vance is a former college football at Kent State who served on the NCAA’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee for three years before ending his college career this past season.
Vance told AP recently that he fears a more professionalized model of college athletics that includes employee status, labor unions, and collective bargaining would end up hurting college athletes.
“It just gets rid of the scholastic model that ... so many great experiences have been built off of and then it turns into a semi-pro league, and truthfully at that point, it really becomes — especially in football, basketball — pay-for-play and also becomes a business,” Vance said.
Envisioning a day when hundreds of humanoid robots can be summoned and deployed at the touch of a button, Agility Robotics has announced its first fleet management platform.
There's intense competition among humanoid robot manufacturers to get their products into the industrial marketplace, where companies like Amazon and BMW are eager for their help.
The new platform, Agility Arc, is a cloud-based tool that'll be able to command a robot army, say, to start moving bins to a conveyor belt at a particular time.
"The ability to control fleets of robots is something that everybody in the robotics business needs to do," Damion Shelton, president of Agility Robotics, tells Axios.
- "I think we're the first humanoid robot vendor to have any solution offering on that front."
- Agility "envisions ultimately very large deployments, into the hundreds," Shelton adds.
Walking, dexterous robots are gradually making the leap from the science lab to the workplace, requiring more sophisticated management systems.
- Agility's robot, named Digit, is being tested by Amazon and GXO Logistics, which recently deployed it at a Spanx warehouse in Georgia.
- A competing robot maker called Figure, which just garnered a massive investment from Jeff Bezos and OpenAI, is starting to staff a BMW production line — and said just yesterday that its robot can "now have full conversations with people on end-to-end neural networks."
- Agility is opening a manufacturing facility in Oregon called RoboFab, with plans to eventually produce 10,000 two-legged robots annually.
Agility just hired a new CEO, Peggy Johnson, formerly of the augmented reality headset maker Magic Leap, to land new customers.
- She's touting Digit's expanding skillset and specs — it's 5'9," 140 pounds, and can lift 35 pounds from the floor to nearly 6 feet.
- The company is planning a "robots as a service" model, in which it'll charge customers a monthly fee for their Digit fleet.
In its earliest incarnations, Digit was controlled by "a single engineer with a laptop, telling the robot to do something," Shelton says.
- Last year the system was upgraded so that multiple robots could be controlled at the same time to work together on a single task.
"Now what we have is a whole integrated fleet management system that allows you to coordinate multiple robots out of a single user interface," Shelton says.
- "That's a big step towards the larger customer deployments, where you would have multiple robots operating within a customer environment and want to track the charge level, the success or failure rate of the robot, and statistics like how much load they've been carrying."
Shelton gave the example of a warehouse that has an inbound tractor-trailer arriving at 3 p.m. with inventory that needs to be processed.
- "So you need all the robots charged up and ready to go by 3 p.m.," he says, "but you also have this body of work that needs to get done from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m."
- With Agility Arc, "you can dynamically load-balance the fleet," Shelton says — ensuring there are constantly enough robots to get the day's work done.
Advances in humanoid robots are coming thick and fast.
- Agility has been experimenting with integrating large language models and generative AI into Digit, so you can assign it tasks in natural language.
- See a video of Digit being told verbally to "pick the box that's the color of Darth Vader's lightsaber and put it on top of the tallest box in the front row."
- The H1 robot from a Chinese company called Unitree recently set the full-size humanoid robot speed record, moving at a top speed of 7.3 mph compared with the old record of 5.5 mph, per IOT World Today.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and other federal agencies are still working out how to set safety rules governing the new metallic workers.
The humanoid robot revolution is upon us — expect these droids to start moving into industrial settings over the next few years, and then retail stores and our homes.
It's as if Elon Musk needed yet another reason to hate OpenAI. The figure, a startup that’s partnered with OpenAI to develop a humanoid robot, released a new video on Wednesday. And it’s truly heads above anything Tesla has demonstrated to date with the Optimus robot.
The video from Figure, which is available on YouTube, shows a human interacting with a robot dubbed Figure 01 (pronounced Figure One). The human has a natural-sounding conversation with the robot, asking it to first identify what it’s looking at.
“I see a red apple on a plate in the center of the table, a drying rack with cups and a plate, and you standing nearby with your hand on the table,” Figure 01 explains in a human-like tone.
The human asks for something to eat, and Figure 01 proceeds to hand him the apple. The human then introduces some trash into the environment and asks the robot to explain why it just did what it did, while also picking up the trash. There is, of course, some lag time as the robot processes the instructions, but it otherwise executes the command perfectly.
“On it. So I gave you the apple because it’s the only, uh, edible item I could provide you with from the table,” Figure 01 says, complete with a disturbingly human “uh” interrupting the middle of the sentence.
For one last trick, the human asks Figure 01 what should happen next based on the placement of the dishes on the table. The robot says the dishes are likely to go in the drying rack next. The human verbally validates the assumption and asks Figure 01 to do just that, demonstrating incredible dexterity and precision in picking up the cup first and flipping it upside down before putting it in its place. Then another demonstration of precision comes when Figure 01 puts the plate in an appropriate ridge on the drying rack.
It’s really worth watching the full video, embedded below, to get a proper understanding of what’s happening.
You may be asking yourself, what’s the big deal? Sure, Musk announced his robot in 2021 with someone dressed in a robot costume, but hasn’t Tesla made incredible progress since then that could rival OpenAI and Figure? Not really.
Tesla’s Optimus can walk around, pick up an egg, and even fold laundry. That’s pretty impressive, right? Only if you’ve taken Elon Musk’s robot demonstration videos at face value. Take a closer look at that laundry folding video from January, for instance. Did you notice anything weird in the lower right corner of that supposedly impressive video?
Still don’t see it? How about if we add a big red arrow? Do you notice how the hand that comes in and out of view matches perfectly with the movements of Optimus’s right hand?
Yes, that appears to be someone using teleoperation to make movements that are then mimicked by Optimus. A human is essentially folding the shirt through remote manipulation, or what’s sometimes referred to as a waldo.
Humans have been making waldo robots since at least the 1940s, and putting teleop capabilities in human-like robots since at least the 1960s. If we’re being honest, the tech that Tesla’s Optimus demonstrates isn’t much more impressive than the audio-animatronics that Disney made for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, as you can see below.
The accidental revelation that came out of Tesla’s video, provided you were looking closely, is why Figure and OpenAI are essentially light-years ahead with their robot. Because Figure 01 isn’t using any tricks like teleoperation, as Figure’s co-founder Brett Adcock confirmed on Wednesday.
“The video is showing end-to-end neural networks. There is no teleop,” Adcock wrote on X. “Also, this was filmed at 1.0x speed and shot continuously.”
Does Musk and the Tesla team have the ability to figure this stuff out? Absolutely. But Adcock and the folks at Figure have taken a big lead, as the video from Wednesday clearly demonstrates. And Figure has assembled a team of people from companies like Boston Dynamics and DeepMind who clearly know what they’re doing.
Corey Lynch, who works on AI at Figure, was clearly proud of his work in a tweet on Wednesday where he described the latest advancements, while also noting Figure 01 isn’t teleoperated. That repetition by employees at Figure that their robot isn’t being operated by a human can only be interpreted as a dig at Musk, who recently sued OpenAI.
“Even just a few years ago, I would have thought having a full conversation with a humanoid robot while it plans and carries out its own fully learned behaviors would be something we would have to wait decades to see,” Lynch wrote. “Obviously, a lot has changed.”