> The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In any case, most actual fighting will be done by small robots, and as you go forth today remember your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.
Without realizing this was a quote from the Simpsons, I read this totally seriously and accepted it as a scarily plausible scenario for the future: a competition for the first power to achieve dominance in the field of robotic war. And once the winning robot army has liquidated their competition, the war can be effectively over—no need for any human lives to be lost…just to surrender to the superior technological force.
US + Allies had clearly superior technological force, but still "lost" to some pretty irregular forces.
I don't think it is so black and white. If Russia/china/pick-your-bogey-man-of-choice invaded your country tomorrow with a robot army and started taking away your way of life (eradication of your native language, your native currency, your media, history, certain foods, schools etc), how do you think that would go down? You'd just roll over and accept everythingyou know and love about where you live being permanently removed because their robots were better? It is the same reason that we can't just have a game of chess to decide it all: when it comes down to trying to force someone to do something against their will, the ultimate and final fall back position is physical force and so sadly violence one way or another.
Never understood the Vietnam 1-to-1 comparison. In Vietnam they were fighting a landwar against a legitimate army backed by Soviet weaponry. Of course there was 100x less dead, Vietnam fielded 800k soldiers at first before growing to 1.5 million at peak. There was no way an airforce/drone war/long distance attacks/etc alone could fight that sort of numbers with their tangible fighting capabilities.
How many organized people were they fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan? With what sort of equipment/regimentality/strategic coordination/etc.
The US + Allies lost because they didn't have the will to obliterate everything.
As horrible as the Afghanistan war was, it would have been even worse if they had just carpet bombed everything. Add robotics, and it quickly enters nightmare fuel worse than the Terminator movies.
Both the US and the Soviets lost because Afghanistan isn't a country in a traditional sense; it's just an area of land with _lots_ of regions countrolled by war lords that doesn't have allegiance to anything central (i.e. "the country Afghanistan").
It's impossible to win a war against something like that, unless - as you correctly points out - you obliterate everything.
I see your point, doing what was required to "win" was not politically feasible. On the other hand, much of the fighters in Afganistan were already accustomed to fighting from rubble. I don't think carpet bombing the mountains would have much affect. Finally, another commenter made this great observation, you can't win when you don't know what winning means.
Had they "obliterated" everything then the US + Allies (or what allies they might have still got left after said obliteration) would have lost even more on the grand scale of things compared to a remote war in Central Asia. No amount of Hollywood + Western Media white-washing would have managed to get that stink off.
Not exactly. They did bomb North Vietnam, but not carpet style, and they never actually invaded North Vietnam. Basically, just like in Afghanistan they were fighting with self inflicted penalties.
> The US + Allies lost because they didn't have the will to obliterate everything.
The Soviet Union did that and also lost. The only way to win in Afghanistan is by fighting in Pakistan. And that means a full invasion, not a half-measure as was tried and failed in Laos and Cambodia.
Nope, Russia has not been able to achieve air superiority and can't use the full force of its air power. Both sides' air defenses are too robust. This has mostly been an artillery/land war.
Afghanistan was a mess for reasons other people have mentioned, but the US held itself back. If you want to see supremacy see Desert Storm. The ground campaign took 100 hours for the US to kick the ass of the fourth largest army in the world, not even mentioning the beauty of the air campaign. It is a master class in the brutal efficiency and warfighting capabilities of the US and other coalition forces. If the US wanted, there is no doubt they could have razed Aghanistan and Vietnam from a pure warfighting standpoint.
Technological and logistical abilities still reign supreme if it comes to an all out war. Asymmetric forces like with Aghanistan and Vietnam were problematic because of political pressures at home, and the long drawn out nature of those conflicts which increased political pressure. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was also perfectly executed, but the long duration occupation was the problem.
Asymmetric forces and insurgencies are problematic, but people overate them in modern discourse because of the weight of the occupation of Aghanistan and Iraq in recent memory. They are easy to crush, but politics at the time was complicated.
> Asymmetric forces and insurgencies are problematic, but people overate them in modern discourse because of the weight of the occupation of Aghanistan and Iraq in recent memory. They are easy to crush, but politics at the time was complicated.
I don't know if I would say "easy to crush". For Western nations i think it's especially hard because the images of civilian deaths have a large effect on the population and voting. Fighting asymmetric forces seems to always involve significant civilian casualties. Other nations operating without those constraints would have an easier time destroying asymmetric forces IMO. I think they would use the same tactics used for crushing dissenting civilians only kill-on-sight instead of at least the illusion of arrest-on-sight.
Yeah but US + Allies have still lost in Iraq too. They won the war sure but now they have a situation where every civilian is a potential hostile combatant.
My point is that the oppressed population who "lost" (Iraqis, Afghanistanis etc in these examples) aren't just like "oh well - I guess I'll just abandon everything I know and believe in and start eating beef and alcohol since the US invasion wiped out my country's military.". Instead they are resisting and so now you get the quagmire where basically anyone old enough to stand is now a threat to the occupiers even if they "wiped out" the army.
So you're not going to have some hypothetical "robot war" where no humans are hurt. The humans will start getting hurt once all the robots are dead.
>just to surrender to the superior technological force.
this is ancient warfare in a nutshell: a couple of battles where you clearly see who has the better army and the side which starts losing a bit too much surrenders the country
Philip K. Dick wrote an interesting (if one is only familiar with the books turned into movies) short story called The Defenders about this. It doesn't have the dire conspiracy theories or corporate run worlds we associate with his more famous work.
Dick also wrote the fantastic short story 'Second Variety'[0] which has a similar theme, but involves autonomous, self-replicating robots that serve as a sort of intelligent mine field that separates warring factions on a the moon or an alien planet in the 1995 movie with the same name.
I love this story and when I first read it I kept thinking - this is the inspiration for Terminator 1/2, then get to furious web searching after finishing it and find out the intro/setting was used for a different movie and Harlan Ellison's supposed connection to Terminator seems much more tenuous than PKD and Second Variety.
This assumes that human lives will be more valuable than war robots. However, humans may be used as cannon fodder to distract enemy robots from targeting valuable equipment.
Brilliant Pebbles seemed to have always been a legit idea, probably the only real solution to the MIRV/glide threat. Something that can respond to the launch immediately close to the launch site. It's just always been crazy expensive and diplomatic kryptonite having weapon systems floating over countries 24/7.
The yearly RoboCup robot soccer championship has been going on for more than 20 years now, and it looks like the objective that they set from the beginning, which was: "By the middle of the 21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, complying with the official rules of FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup" is well within reach.
The human players would likely be worried about that as well, potentially hobbling them with one considerable psychological disadvantage. Is there any way to mitigate that? If not, such contests may always tip in the robots favour for such sports.
Humans can be hard to humans too and then they get a yellow/red card. Same for robots in RoboCup already. A teams wanting to really go up against humans will have to be safe.
Come on, there's so many things happening in football that are in between no contact and yellow/red card worthy. Defenders sliding straight into the ball and tackling the attacker because of the momentum, gentle pushes between players during corners for better positioning, two players contesting the ball as it's descending from high up, etc, etc. No way anyone's doing any of that against something that has a similar build to yours, but weights much more and is all metal.
Something like volleyball or tennis which is explicitly a contactless sport? Sure, provided that robots use similar strength to push the ball, otherwise a lot of fingers will be broken. Football is never happening.
In that penalty example you've shared nothing happens and then the ball is in the goal. They're supposed to be much more physchological. Both players are supposed to pay close attention to body movement to "predict" the side and the goalkeeper is supposed to see the shooter approaching the ball to know when to react.
They could be soft by then. They should also have a comparable weight because you don't want to be on the ground under by a soft 200 kg man or robot or whatever.
However they'll win easily if they are made to be stronger and / or faster.
Strength: hard for humans to push them around and to steal the ball from and easy for them to do it to humans.
Fast: they'll just throw the ball past the defenders and run, like boys vs children. No need to use any soccer skill.
How to manage the athletic performance level of the robots? They could be made much faster and more energetic than the human players. Some might consider that cheating if they can run twice as fast, say. Can they communicate wirelessly with each other or are they limited to visual/audible cues? Skeuomorphism.
Presumably by size. What's the fasted/best, bipedal, robot weighing roughly 170 pounds that can operate for 90 minutes?
What's the intermediate step for this? What's the record for a bipedal 100m dash? For one big enough to meaningfully kick a soccer ball (even if it can't currently)? What's the 100m dash record for a robot that can also run 7+ miles over 90 minutes?
I feel like we're close -- but we're not really close. We're close on individual qualifications, but not combining them. We may genuinely be there with the control systems and computing if we had a performant robot.
I'm glad this finally made it to the front page. This research deserves more attention than it's been getting. The movements and strategy are very impressive for something trained end-to-end and exclusively in simulation. I don't think I've ever seen anyone get better motions out of this kind of servomotor-driven robot.
I think the paper published in Science Robotics 2020 by the team at ETH is more impressive. They made a fully simulation trained quadrupedal robot walk on ice, rocky terrain, and even in a river. Without much of the nitty-gritty tweaking seen in this paper
During university I was part of a robocup team and this is the first time I was genuinely impressed with movement of these robots. These kind of robot is often seen in the Humanoid League and during games they don't move nearly as fast and controlled. If even at all.
That said, during competitions it is not allowed to use external motion tracking as it is used in the paper. The necessary image processing takes a good chunk out of the processing power budget and the quality of image sensors this size doesn't help. Also most teams wouldn't train their expensive robots this way because the risk of damaging it is way too high.
I think this is a glimpse of what's to come in robot soccer. But we are a long way away for self contained autonomous robots to behave this way.
> Also most teams wouldn't train their expensive robots this way because the risk of damaging it is way too high.
They train it in a simulation, and these robots are quite expensive too. The only problem is getting miniaturized hardware, which we are bound to see very soon as there are vast practical applications, I'm thinking dishwashers and refrigerators.
training it will be way harder and the net probably needs to grow to eliminate external motion tracking, but I don't think the image processing and quality of image sensors is the bottleneck. These robots need the right hardware for quick inference, maybe some specialised inference chips or something, but I think if you manage to train a net that can do this, you can deploy it in principle on the robots. It looks like it has a "Intel Core i3 processor dual core" which is definitely not the right hardware for efficient (throughput + power consumption) inference.
The problem is imho that the problem is way harder and we will probably struggle to train a net that can do this in simulation. It might just be impossible with our current capabilities, we might have to wait a few years until research catches up with the problem. But I am not a RL guy and can comment only from my computer vision-perspective.
I have a fully articulated quadruped here and it cost like $15 per DOF (excluding the control board), which is pretty much the price of a small servo. I bet if someone wanted to, they could make a humanoid like this for under $1000. The problem is that there's no market because control algorithms are already pretty wonky for 4+ legs. Two legs is just too unstable, even if you just want to ply around with it.
If that's true than it is insane. These things pull almost three amps at max torque. Now assume you need at least 14 of those. You probably never see them running for more than 20s in the video because they just run out of battery.
Can anyone with good robotics experience explain why these types of robots are not in wider commercial use?
We have seen interesting robots like this one, from Boston Dynamics and others but they still seem to be far from displacing humans in the workforce. It seems that these robots have similar fine motor skills to humans, enough to displace humans in more economic activities.
If visual detection and response is the problem, teleoperation is always an option: hire people from low-labor cost countries to operate them remotely.
So I am assuming that some kind of manufacturing costs are the reason that these robots are not taking over more human labor in advanced economies. Is that correct?
> Can anyone with good robotics experience explain why these types of robots are not in wider commercial use?
Can't claim lots of experience, but: Consider how much is happening with these kinds of robots that's not actually related to the task.
If you want a production line, a well designed arm with replaceable tool will be much more efficient. If you want a fast moving delivery robot, you want a shelf with wheels. If you want all terrain mobility, you have treads.
Currently it's much easier/cheaper to get something specialised for the task you actually want done rather than building something super generic and human like. "Can it balance itself while chasing a ball" is not a problem you want to be solving, ever. Neither "how to use tools while moving sensors can see the object from extremely limited angles". Human-like robots introduce lots of issues we don't need to be solving - why build a Rube Goldberg machine if you don't need one?
Every single joint/motor you don't need is extra maintenance. Every single "this thing needs to balance itself" element is wasted power. Every extra self-support processing from the sensor is unnecessary delay.
I would not be so quick to say that this is an "obvious" outcome though.
You could apply the same argument to computer hardware: General purpose CPUs are incredibly wasteful compared to specialized hardware (see Bitcoin mining where ASICs are many orders of magnitude faster than even GPUs), yet on the whole the value of being able to iterate in software wins out.
I'm not sure that maps well. It's kind of true, but the universal use of CPUs does not have major downsides - you're missing the potential improvements, not losing anything. And we fully specialise where it makes financial sense (AES in CPUs), and half-specialise elsewhere (GPUs).
On the other hand, a generic humanoid has lots of cost/complexity/maintenance/etc impact. An articulated arm with a tool for a given task can do things you can't generalise (think DaVinci robot precision vs auto construction high power - humanoid can't replace either)
There's also massively higher market for CPUs (multiple per person, cheap) than for humanoid robots (tiny percentage per person, expensive), so the economy is different.
>fine motor skills
Hardly. Most tasks we want robots to do involve using hands rather than legs. Robots are still very bad at picking stuff up and moving it around.
>Teleoperation
has been tried. Redwood robotics tried it, but couldn't make it work. It is still very challenging to control robots remotely and get manipulation as good as humans get. Haptics and force feedback is VERY sensitive to latency too. The current state of the art of teleoperation used in the avatar prize required complicated haptics setups. Essentially the operator needs to have a robot to get force feedback.
It's not manufacturing costs, it's that robots aren't very good.
They are good compared to other robots, but compared to humans they are at an unbearably cute toddler-level soccer. Double their size and they might become more useful, but much more clumsy and fragile.
To add on to what everyone else said. Effective automation usually does the job in a different way than a human.
Automated burger cooking doesn't put a burger on a grill/griddle and flip it when it looks good, it cooks it from both sides at once on a conveyor with human set timing. Sewing machines have a different method than hand sewing. Printers don't generally move a pen across paper, they make a series of dots in a line (old school plotters are an exception, but modern plotters are inkjet dots in a line). Dishwashers don't scrub dishes, they just shoot recurculated hot, soapy water everywhere.
Methods that would be tedious or difficult or unsafe for humans can be simple for machines, and following human methods would be difficult, imprecise, and costly.
A factory environment can usually be arranged with belts or tracks to avoid carrying, and with surfaces suitable for wheels rather than requiring legs.
This particular kind is easy to explain an answer for - not cheap/easy/etc enough.
6 axis are quite common, and getting every more common
They were always used, but are now like, not the price of a house in the bay area for a reasonable one.
It's rare to need a lot beyond that for say, production line manufacturing for a wood processing plant.
Everything is already in line, etc.
They can lift and move things, spray finish, you name it.
Most of the time is programming.
The arms can be fast and accurate.
Now, the more general kind of warehouse work, like people walking around shelving things, that's harder - you get into issues around size of motors, actuation accuracy, etc.
In lots of cases it's easier to design a warehouse around robot capability than design robots around warehouse structure.
Unless there are dramatic breakthroughs, you will see arms and such get used more and more at places with less money and lower margins (IE random metal/wood shop) well before full on bipedal/quadruped robots.
Or you know, people will use the arms as novelties to smack the person who broke the build in the exact center of the back of their head with a precise amount of force.
Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations has been awful for half a century.
Most industrial robots are moving to fixed positions, with maybe a little vision guidance at the end.
It's everything. Starting with compute unit, sensors. They _are_ getting smaller and cheaper.
Then there are actuators. Small robots use servos which are not fast enough. Bigger robots, like those from Boston Dynamics, use brushless motors. Which are fast, but have limited torque.
Then there is the cost. Without volume it's absurdly high.
Then competitors, they can easily reproduce. For example Boston Dynamics sell it's dog sized robot for $75k, while mechanically similar Chinese are $4-10k.
Then the biggest question is what are you going to do with it for this price? Special note: we already have vacuums. You cannot send it shopping alone. Any other realistic ideas?
Thank you for the insights. Realistically, how long do you think it's going to be before small businesses (for example, retailers or small warehouses and manufacturers) start using robots like the Boston Dynamics products in their day to day workflows?
Some robots, such as spot is already used in business. This one [1] is used at a power plant, and some warehouses have fully automated pipeline. When I went to a job interview for Mujin in Japan they told me they had fully automated the new Nike warehouse
The big promise is that if you make it capable of the same physical feats as humans, then all you need to make it capable of doing almost any chore is software, and software is a lot easier to iterate on with huge advances right now in the form of LLMs, plus having effectively zero marginal cost once development is paid for. It'll probably do those tasks slower than a human for the foreseeable future, but that's unlikely to be a deal-breaker if it can reliably do the tasks. It's more expensive than a robot vacuum, but it can vacuum for you and prepare the house for vacuuming by moving things and putting clutter back where it belongs, something current vacuums can't do. It's more expensive than a dishwasher, but it can collect the dishes itself and then put them back into storage itself, something current dishwashers can't do. It can collect dirty laundry and put it in the washing machine, then take it out and dry it, then fold it and put it away, then get your clothes ready when you need them - a washing machine can't do that. If it's capable of doing the same tasks physically as a human, it should be able to charge itself, update itself, do some light maintenance on itself (e.g. clearing dust from sensors and feet, cleaning most of its chassis, replacing certain parts), meaning a good system shouldn't introduce more work than it's alleviating. It should be able to tidy up and mop properly, and if it gets close enough to human speed it may be able to cook - nothing commercially available can do those. It should be able to move furniture, arrange cables, and do some basic DIY tasks, maybe even 'destructive' DIY if you own your home - nothing commercially available can do that. It is very unlikely to be as efficient at any of those tasks as a purpose built, industrial-style robot specialised to a single task, but if it can do all of them to a satisfactory standard for a cheaper price than outfitting your home with every automated machine under the sun (some of which don't even exist yet, the economics for creating them aren't great, and they would take a huge amount of space in your home), then there's a value proposition there. Plus, there is also value in the visible solution being more familiar and understandable, rather than your home being filled with big cubes, rectangles, and robotic arms that infringe on your space even if they're made safe to be around humans.
Basically, with current automated solutions humans form the "glue" between all existing home automation solutions, because humans are generally capable where existing solutions are specific and fragile. If that "glue" role can be performed by a humanoid robot, then it dramatically reduces the amount of housework humans have to do.
As for who might buy it for the price, the obvious answer is people who are rich enough to afford it but either not rich enough to hire service staff or who don't want to employ service staff for other reasons (privacy, don't want to be personally exposed to wealth inequality, racism, fear of theft, fear of disease). Another answer is disabled people. A lot of disabled people love their support workers and have important, humane relationships with them. A lot of other disabled people (like me) love what support workers do and think it's important but are unwilling to go through the arduous process of finding someone you trust to be there when you're at your most vulnerable, or being forced to make do with one of the small proportion of support workers who don't care about their clients that much or are borderline abusive (or actually abusive). In countries with socialised or subsidised medicine, I could very easily see the case for covering humanoid robotic helpers. Already in my country various machines worth up to $8000 or even $100,000 can be covered for disabled people depending on how much it would help, the medical need for it, etc, under various different programs. These aren't small programs either, a lot of disabled people here have access to these resources. A lot of money is also allocated on an ongoing basis specifically for support workers, and for humanoid robots specifically I could see them being eligible to access those funds because of the overlap in role between them and support workers. It won't be a good solution for every disabled person, but it could be a good solution for a lot of us.
Amazing stuff - immediately reminiscent of two blokes pissed out of their heads who've broken into a five-a-side court for a kickabout on their way home from the pub.
When I was younger I was thoroughly unimpressed by "adults chasing a ball". Getting older, while still not a fan, I've become amazed at the stuff these bodies can do. An 80kg person taking a split-second decision to jump one/ one and a half meter into the air, rotating more than 90 degrees so that their legs are actually above their heads, reaching a ball travelling at a 100km/h and hitting it to send it on a target, then falling flat without hurting themselves, just to get up and start running again? Just wow.
When I read first three words I started to cringe preemptively, these words should include a trigger warning. HN should be a safe space for Agile victims.
Robot wars and AI wars fought inside artificial environments would be totally fine with me, if the robots honoured the outcome and their masters likewise.
I have no problem with robot football warfare settling disputes. It's the fan violence which worries me: Maybe we need robots for that too?
Basically its F1. The drivers are cosmetic at this point, and the fans are all behind TV screens. If somebody tells me F1 has been faked for the last 10 years I would believe it.
I like how they trained the robots to fake "AAAAAH MY ANKLE HE KILLED MY ANKLE REF REF FOUL" falls.
Why would anyone honor the results of a war in a controlled setting? The whole point of war is to compel a result the other country doesn’t want to honor.
Its a bit of a reductive ad absurdiam. No, obviously not unless the mediator (referee) had some overarching control to make it forceful. And, you clearly need the organ and scoreboard and hotdogs too.
Ben Bova wrote a juvenalia SF about it in 1969 called "the Duelling Machine" -its classic coming-of-age stuff.
In times past, in history, yes you could settle things like kingly succession by a single pair of champions, but I find it passing strange. Its like the armies basically say: "stuff this, if you want this outcome so badly, you duke it out guys" -but this comes from a time when wars were won or lost by who could pay off the mercenaries the best.
"Lets take this to the international court of arbitration" only works so far. China (spratleys) and Australia and East Timor (oil wells) can tell tales about how much people behave nicely in international arbitration. They behave about as well as a robot trained to fake out ankle kicks HE HIT ME REF REF ITS A FOUL ITS A FOUL I WANT A FREE KICK
>In the distant future, mankind has forsaken global wars for battles of single combat. The world has been divided into two opposing super powers, with each side represented by trained champions.
Mechwarrior boxing, more or less. The 5/10 imdb rating is well deserved. Mostly notable for a writing credit by Joe Haldeman, who managed to get an accurate depiction of a megawatt-class laser weapon on screen.
> Why would anyone honor the results of a war in a controlled setting?
Obviously it won't work every time. But we do have controlled settings to settle disputes.
Previously if two different persons thought they ought to control a country they gathered troops and fought it out. Nowadays in many modern countries we try to channel these disputes into "voting" and "democracy".
Similarly in days of yore if your boy disrespected mine we got a good blood feud on our hand. Nowadays we try to channel similar disputes into lawsuits.
The range of conflicts and disputes we settle with force vs the ones we settle with simulated violence is not fixed.
Why do people, very powerful ones tend to agree to use democracy or lawsuit instead of unrestrained violence? Because we arranged the circumstances such that to do otherwise would impart a greater risk and cost on them. And that is the same how we can make anyone honour the result of a "war in controlled setting".
I honestly think there's a huge market for a consumer grade "pet" robot. Would love to have one of these running around, then I can just turn it off when I leave
Those are consumer-grade robots, with much better software. (They probably upgraded the motor controllers, too. But those are only crappy because hobby servo technology is stuck in the 1970s.)
It is indeed pricey though, IIRC the cost of a Boston Dynamics Spot-like robot came down to around $6-7k. There is still room to drive the price down though.
I'd recommend XGO-mini2. It just finished it's Kickstarter funding for the version 2, which runs on raspberry pi. (disclaimer, I did contribute to their Kickstarter) and optionally also comes with an arm.
I came here to post the same. These are the most adorable robots, I have ever seen. The progress made in motor skills compared to earlier is impressive.
Exactly. I thought it was cute for lack of a better word. Like the Deep Blue chess challenge, I wonder how long until these kind of bots are challenging our best athletes.
Unfortunately there has and always will be the obvious cheaper way to produce "expendable soldiers", as a certain current conflict brutally illustrates.
Is there? These things are commercially available for 15k, I would imagine that if you wanted to buy 100k of them you could drive the price down substantially.
What is your plan for getting expendable soldiers for less than this? Even Russia spends more per soldier.
I can' wait to show my kids. This will be a "collision of worlds" to see what is possible, by bringing together their favorite sport (that they play constantly) and their lego interest... and what I hope is the long path of deep work, culminating in FRC .
Out of curiosity, is the field signaling to robots relative positions and goal locations via radio etc, or are the robots are working 100% with visual recognition ?
Well, and your favorite side will be offering to kit yours out to look like anybody you want.
Then someone will get permission to let you pay for first-person or pseudo-third-person streams from given customized combatants.
This will be a definite "personalization of warfare" moment.
Then special ops of the kind only previously imagined will cross the traditional extreme privacy barrier.
A group of teens will crowdfund a tremendously capable soccer/spec-ops bot that strongly resembles Christ Jesus. They will dress it in robes, swim it into the Spratleys, and it will emerge from the water, tie a crown of thorns around its head like Rambo, and then...it will be mowed down.
But this will only be the first exciting moment. I fully expect version 3 to make it past the beachhead.
If it's a pathway to something like machines that can go through a landfill and separate plastic from aluminum then I'm all for it. But this is just so dumb, I'm sorry.
Why? In this context it makes sense. You don't want the robots damaging themselves or hurting spectators. It's not like they're just making an autocomplete here.
https://youtu.be/oazwTDeqF54