If the idea of robots taking on humans in a road race conjures dystopian images of android athletic supremacy, then fear not, for now at least.
USA is trying to keep China from competing on AI, preventing them access to the same high end chips the west have.
But I don’t think it’s working, China simply has a way to massive well educated talent mass, and they are investing heavily too.
I think USA would be better off allowing Nvidia to compete equally, taking away 25+% of their market isn’t helping USA/Nvidia, it’s only helping the Chinese newcomers getting customers that would otherwise use Nvidia.Essentially USA is helping their competitors get better financing.
That Boston Dynamics robot used to get knocked over every time they hit it with a broom. Used to. I for I’ve welcome our merciful and generous machine overlords.
Strange competition as well. Let’s see a person outrun a car for 13 miles. There already Jaguars driving hundreds of thousands of miles more carefully than humans are. Why are we forcing them to be bipedal? Person in race vs a smart missile. Missile makes it to another continent before the person makes anywhere near that. Drones are flying around without need of human guidance. Computers are faster at just about everything and always will be. There’s a reason we make phone calls or emails instead of sending a letter.
I heard they’re pretty great, building bike lanes and such
I’m amazed they made it the whole way. Still impressive.
Some didn’t make it. Like the Pony Express, they swapped horses.
Companies were also allowed to swap their androids with substitutes when they could no longer compete
Just wait until they make androids that can repair other androids
Dr. Rem to the rescue!
The first robot across the finish line, Tiangong Ultra – created by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center – finished the route in two hours and 40 minutes.
The winner of the men’s race on Saturday finished in 1 hour and 2 minutes.
What a misleading headline. This was a 13 mile race. The robots lost by about 8 miles.
That comes out to a speed of 7.5km/h or 4.7mph, barely above a brisk walk. Good to know if I ever need to outrun humanoid robots it won’t be hard. (The self-driving cars are another matter).
For now. Just a few years ago humanoid robots were only a pipe dream/nightmare…
Robots kind of suck compared to humans in terms of energy efficiency, sure a factory robot arm can crush you but if it had to run on the electricity equivelent of a bowl of bran flakes you could overpower it with one hand and not much effort. (barring an insane gear ratio which would make the thing incredibly slow)
Robots are a lot more energy efficient than humans. Human muscles are around 25% efficient while robotic motors can be >90%. However they lose massively in energy density. 100 grams of carbs has 1.7 MJ of energy, which is equivalent to 2-3kg of lithium batteries. A human can run for hours on a kg of calorie dense foods, while a robot would need a bulky battery or constant battery swaps/recharges.
Motors are super heavy compared to human muscles as well. And the ropes in our muscles make it so the biggest “motors” are near our center of gravity.
Imagine how long we could run on a liter of diesel or gas. Not to mwntion uranium /s
Easily the rest of your life!
Thank goodness John Henry has taught us Americans that machines will never beat humans, so we obviously know how this will end. /s
this means they can catch the average person
That’s still faster than me though…
Yeah, lets try again in about 5 years.
Do these people miss slavery so much they have to build humanoid robots so they can own them?
That is a weird take.
The robots are human shaped because the human shape is a good shape to be to interact with our environment. And environment that by definition has been designed to interact with human shapes.
I agree, it’s a bit of a weird take especially when we’re talking about robots in a marathon, not in a textile factory or flipping McBurgers.
I guess I was thinking: why give up the efficiency of wheels/tracks/propellers for walking (a less simple movement) and why only one set of arms? Why would you want a robot to look human at the cost of being as multitasking and movement challenged as it’s owner? I kept imagining Angry Bender from Futurama where he has 3 very maneuverable metal tentacle arms on each side. (Though normally he’s pretty humanoid in shape too). I still think we’re overly anthropomorphizing them and it’s a bit creepy. It seems like we’re building the tech based on Hollywood as much as anything else. I hear you when you say the shape is a good “fit” for our built environment, but I think we can do even better so it’s interesting that we decided our bodies were the pinnacle of biology and technology.
I think we can do even better so it’s interesting that we decided our bodies were the pinnacle of biology and technology.
It’s not that we think the human form is the optimum, it is simply that we don’t want to have to modify human accessible areas for robots, partially because this increases the cost of automation and also partly because we need the environments to still be human accessible. In environments where you will only have robots, then the robots have freedom to be whatever design we want, but a general purpose robot needs to exist in a human-built environment, an environment with things like stairs, lips on curbsides, and boxes with handles designed for human hands. There are videos out there with the spot robot trying to do something simple like open a door with its weird giraffe neck arm thing, it’s not graceful and it’s not quick, because it is interacting with an object that was not designed with it’s body shape. It is much easier to build a human-shaped robot than it is to redesign all doors to have an interface to allow a robot of any arbitrary shape to operate it.
Also aesthetics do matter, if humans are going to be interacting with these robots they need to look like something that’s at least sort of friendly, if it looks like a multi limbed weird techno spider no one’s going to want to interact with them.
Won’t someone think of the lithium!
“Humanity could not stomach slavery for things they could not grow or make.”
the word “robot” originates from the Czech word “robota,” which means forced labor or serfdom.
I just hope they dont give these thing sentence. Can’t have 200 iq immortal kill bots angry that their biological owners inflicted pain on them for every small infraction.
I think a robot with sentences is just ChatGPT.
When I think robot, I think physical body
