China has held the world’s first robot martial arts tournament and I can’t think of a single thing that could possibly go wrong
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/china-has-held-the-worlds-first-robot-martial-arts-tournament-and-i-cant-think-of-a-single-thing-that-could-possibly-go-wrong/
19 Comments
“We can surely all agree there’s absolutely nothing to be concerned about when it comes to robots and AI. So, it makes perfect sense to hold what’s claimed to be the world’s first martial arts tournament for robots. It’s all completely harmless fun and games, nothing that remotely brings to mind Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 gone rogue. Nope.
The [G1 is actually available to buy from $16,000](https://www.unitree.com/g1), just in case you want your own killing machine, sorry friendly household bot, and it comes with 3D LIDAR and two-hour battery life.
If all this sounds like a robot zombie apocalypse in the making, a quick scan of the [Youtube highlights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TVDpo8M058&t=1s) paints a slightly different picture. While some of the moves are impressive, more often the bots are flailing around, punching at thin air or tripping over themselves.
That said, this stuff is undeniably developing fast…”
Please tell me the tournament included an 8 bit version of Kung Fu Fighting
Let’s pump the brakes here.
Things aren’t developing fast, these things suck and they’ve been working on them for 20 years.
It’s not scary, we have had remote control cars and boats for decades, these are that but with arms.
Once every few years robotics tries to make itself relevant in the news, but as always, it’s a complete nothing burger.
The most impressive part was they’ve improved its gait when walking and its ability to get up looked efficient and effective.
If you actually want to be scared of killer robots, look at anything the various militaries are doing with turrets. Fascists and border-guard fanatics are salivating at the mouth at the prospect of a system that can pick off migrants from a hundred yards while ignoring tagged friendlies, or riot control equipped with facial recognition and “less-lethal” rounds that can shoot wildly into a crowd and conveniently miss undercover agitators – or conveniently headshot dissident leaders like Bernie or AOC.
A robot butler that can flip out and kill its owner is actually a better scenario, given who’s likely to own robot butlers.
There’s an actual war being fought with heat seeking suicide drones but a glorifed RC toy is what worries the media. What a joke.
Real Steel.
Honestly, this looks like it would be fun to watch. Who doesn’t like watching “metal bashing metal, steel smashing steel”?
This looks like BattleBots crossed with MXC.. I’d definitely watch more of this.
Chill. I saw plenty of clips and it was disappointingly bad. The robots were all remote controlled with terrible latencies. It was like watching toddlers fight in slow motion. No coordination, constant misses, and lots of random falling down. None of the robots hit hard enough to actually cause damage to each other. The worst damage the robots sustained was from tripping.
A much better robot fighting show was battle bots from 2010. It had much more mayhem, violence and destruction.
What a stupid headline. This is fun, but literally nothing to be concerned about
The headline is dumb. This fight is just silly. They don’t have much power and fall over their own feet. I would watch something like that if they had different bots that are preferably not remote controlled.
I like how there are flying drones dropping grenades on heads and bombing buildings into literal oblivion but these stumbling zombie bots is what has this guy worried about the future
Robot martial arts: the ultimate test of coding skills and robot insurance premiums.
It may just be a 35kg robot, but putting a human in the ring together with the robots is just a disaster waiting to happen, especially with the robots flailing around like that. A wrong flip or what and the referee could’ve easily gotten injured.
Couldn’t they have built a referee bot?
Also, why are these bots flailing around like that? Surely they could’ve improved the balance and coordination systems first before doing this exhibition because right now this is just embarrassing.
Competition is literally one of the bed rocks of progress
At present, we’re at the AI Pratfalls Era – perhaps with some Benny Hill music playing as the AIs go toe-to-toe. It’d be much scarier if they had Robot Wars designs, like Carbide. Or, indeed, robot dogs. Or robot dogs with weapons attached. Or all-terrain robots with weapons attached. You get the idea.
Rule number one of any machine with intelligence—always install an off switch that it cannot remove and does not know about.
Soon we will see robot Chinese soldiers doing a lot more than missing punches or kicks
Karate Kid 18. How he started from a microchip to become the world champion robot jujitsu champion.
That was a really cool video but I was crestfallen to learn they had teams controlling them. Regardless the move sets were autonomously learned by watching video of kickboxers and that’s incredible. Their balance and ability to get up was fantastic. At the moment something like this on a training sled like a punching bag is would feel weirdly like fighting a real person. Real life 40k training cages here we come