I watched a bunch of videos from this week’s World Humanoid Robot Games in China. This segment on YouTube is an okay place to start.
These robots are advancing more quickly than I was expecting. I’ve blogged a few times that humanoid robots are a bad idea, and now I’m really convinced of the danger.
There will be helpful robots that fold your clothes. There will also be robots working in factories. And at the other extreme, there will be military strike teams of a dozen robots led by a single human. I’m not an AI doomer — quite the opposite! — but it’s easy to imagine the worst case here.
I think small, special-purpose robots would’ve been a better path. R2-D2, not C-3PO. We imbue human traits in anything that looks humanoid, blurring our perception of the line between machine and sentient being. When these humanoid robots crashed out in China, I almost felt for them, even though they are designed purely for movement with no consciousness.
The future is going to be wild, and it appears too late to change the trajectory of robotics except with small, incremental corrections.
