In a now viral video, a man controlling a Unitree robot accidentally made the humanoid kick him right in the groin, forcing him into a groaning heap while painfully and visually embodying the promise and perils of advanced robotics.
“Yep, let’s go ahead and train our future AI overlords how to kick ass,” one X user quipped upon viewing the clip, which was originally posted on Christmas Day to the Chinese video sharing website Bilibili. “Maybe we do deserve to become made redundant.”
The video opens to the inside of a regular office space in what appears to be China and a man in a black motion capture suit standing next to a Unitree G1 robot, which follows his movements after a second or so of delay. The man squares up into a kickboxing stance and then starts pacing, shadow boxing, and kicking the air until the robot slips in front of him and kicks him in the nutsack, spurring both the man and the person holding the camera to groan in pain.
The original poster to Bilibili wrote that the man in the motion capture suit was directing the robot’s own actions via use of a motion control model based on a neural network, and that’s why there’s a slight delay between the man’s actions and the robot’s movements.
“This delay will gradually decrease as technology advances, potentially reaching as low as 0.1 seconds,” the poster wrote on Bilibili.
The video elicited jokes on X and elsewhere about misalignment, the concept in which an AI system would be optimized for its goals, but would consequently run roughshod over ethical concerns or otherwise cause harm.
“I guess they forgot to hard-code the Three Laws into their robots,” said one X user, referring to science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics found in his novels and short stories that are meant to govern robotic behavior and prevent them from causing harm to humans.
Beyond the novelty factor of this video, it’s also another showcase of the increasing agility of these robots such as Unitree’s which can run and dance with verve.
But be forewarned — despite all this razzle dazzle, many tech experts think humanoid robots aren’t quite ready for prime time use in the human environment due to various hardware and software issues. Judging from the pain the man took from the Unitree robot’s kick, though, these clankers may be better suited for the boxing ring than the factory floor, where they could be used for combat matches like in the movie Real Steel.
More on robots: Disastrous Video Shows Robot Trying to Cook, Destroying Interior of House