Over the last decade, manufacturers of humanoid robots have tried to make their creations increasingly similar to humans. But here in 2024, we seem to be witnessing a strange shift in the dexterity of our two-legged robo-dreams. To put it bluntly, robotics companies aren’t afraid to get weird with the contortions of their latest offerings.
China-based Unitree Robotics released a new video on Monday, available on Youtubepresents the new G1, available in retail $16,000. It’s just the latest demonstration of a robot maneuvering in completely inhumane ways to achieve its goals, as you can see in the GIF above.
The video contains many strange movements and shows how the robot can get up from the ground or greet people by pulling Exorcist Move your upper body 180 degrees. And it all looks strikingly similar to Boston Dynamics’ new version of the Atlas, which works in a novel way get on your feet.
There’s also a demonstration of the Unitree robot being kicked and pushed, presumably to show how well it can maintain balance even when it encounters resistance. But we’d be lying if we said it didn’t make us uncomfortable. After all, they are robots that look like humans. And observing wanton cruelty, even against a machine that has no feelings, triggers something deep in our brains that says they shouldn’t do that.
Here too, these contortions all seem to be somewhat new. A decade ago, Gizmodo visited the DARPA Robotics Challenge in Southern California, where teams largely competed against each other by trying to make their robots as human-like as possible. Every year, companies like Boston Dynamics release new videos showing their robots walking, running, and ultimately performing backflips, all in the same way talented humans might do.
But we seem to be on the cusp of a new era when it comes to robotics. Most robot manufacturers have achieved basic human-style walking and running. The new frontier is to harness this form factor and transform them into superhumans, whether through gymnastics or by applying logic and reason to the world in front of them.
We’re still a long way from AGI helping robots complete tasks, but if we continue on this path, it’s unlikely that robots will do the everyday tasks that humans don’t want to do. We enabled the AI to skip all the boring stuff and start making music and writing poetry straight away. It seems silly to think that we are building an army of butlers to serve humanity with this technology. No, we’ll probably have the robots painting beautiful landscapes while we’re all stuck at our desks filling out Excel spreadsheets, if recent history is any guide.