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A humanoid robot at China’s Spring Festival Gala is going viral for appearing to try to attack one of the members of the audience. The robots were on hand to perform with human dancers doing the Chinese folk dance Yangge.
It’s unclear from reports whether this incident occurred before or after the AI-powered humanoid robots performed their dance as part of the Chinese New Year celebrations. And dance they did. (But can they perform a kickin’ DJ set?)
In a televised report filed by Chilevision Noticias, we see a group of these humanoid robots just chilling in the area of what appears to be the area between the stage and the festival attendees.
All seems pretty normal until one of the robots starts walking towards the crowd. Perhaps it didn’t appreciate the comment someone made and wanted to dare them to say it again to its, uh, … well, it doesn’t really have a face.
Once coming face to non-face with the festival goer, the robot appears to lose it’s s—, appearing very angry and thrashing around and even appearing to try and headbutt someone. (At least it didn’t break anyone’s fingers this time.) Thankfully, security quickly jumped into action, grabbing the robot by the scruff of its, umm, neck and hauling it back away from the crowd before things escalated further.
Apparently, someone at the festival claimed it was merely “a simple robot failure.” A Reddit thread from a group that has a word I can’t use here in their name discussed the humanoid robot going HAM on the crowd in China.
One of the suggestions for what actually happened, yet is unconfirmed, was, “It tripped on the fence it walked into, making its upper portion fall forward, but with everything from the torso down being cut off in the video, you don’t see the legs stumbling into the fence like an NPC follower. So it kind of looked like an attack, but it very likely was not.”
While that comment may or may not be true, some of the other comments were far more entertaining.
“Looked like she made a gesture that he thought was threatening,” one person responded. “He tried to lure her into a false sense of calm and when it was in range he tried to head butt her, not realizing how small his head is, he quickly switches to plan B. Which is climb over the fence… that’s when the handler stepped in and quickly reset him. I don’t think we are watching the same video.”
“Bro was looking for [an] excuse,” another person joked, while someone else wrote, “She was talking bad about his motherboard.”
Another person observed, “Anyone notice the other robot seem to roll up to look at the commotion?”
So, just to review, by my count, robots now have access to autonomous real-time learning AI, superhuman vision, synthetic bodies that can self-heal, knowledge on how to use deadly weapons, the ability to fly, throw punches, run and do parkour, the ability to communicate with one another, drive cars, fool computer systems into thinking they are human, how to self-replicate and build larger versions of themselves, skills to invent computer chips humans can’t understand, and have figured out how to deceive and manipulate humans. No big deal.