China just hosted the world’s first humanoid robot boxing match — and I’m not sure whether to cheer or panic.
At the CMG World Robot Competition in Hangzhou, 1.3-metre, 35kg humanoid robots had full-on kickboxing fights. They punched, kicked and defended. If you’ve seen Real Steel then you have an idea of what I’m talking about.
Organised by China Media Group and Unitree Robotics, the bots were remotely controlled by human operators, but of-course they were AI-assisted.
These machines aren’t like the toys we grew up playing with, they’re designed to learn and get better over time.
And yes, there are plans for full-sized robot matches next. Just in case you weren’t intimidated enough by these 1.3 metre fellas.
But should we really be doing this?
We’ve seen AI ignore shutdown commands and override instructions. We were talking about it just yesterday: Refusing Shutdown, Cheating at Chess, and Blackmailing Humans: AI Is Already Acting Strange
Now we’re handing it a pair of fists and telling it to spar. As the old saying goes, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’
Teaching robots to fight, even as sport, might be fun now, but it takes us closer to the robot uprising we’ve been warned about.
When the robots eventually stop listening as they are already starting to, we might wish we had stuck to building ones that just vacuumed the floor.
That said, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the robots fight.
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