A machine is stronger and faster than a human? Shocking. Next we'll learn that cranes can lift heavy loads faster than a human with ropes and pulleys.
> Lightning the humanoid robot clocks 9.32sec in Beijing
Bipedal, hips, knees, feet. Looks humanoid to me.
If cloudflare puts this in a grid of images and asks me to pick the humanoids, I’m clicking it
Such robot would easily smash the current marathon record as well and the only thing I'd be impressed by, would be the battery capacity tbh.
Everyone has the same basic objective and measurement norm, so we can see how performance improves year over year, and how different manufacturers handle a specific known goal, even if it's not super-representative of real world use cases.
Billion-dollar supercomputers don't spend most of their time running LINPACK, and some probably perform better on specific tasks, but it doesn't make the Top 500 list any less of a thing.
If you were ever trapped on the top floor of a burning building, should we just send a car up there?
Nobody is surprised by advancement like this, but there is still a lot of engineering that went into it, not talking about how it’s now almost consumer grade tech that you can buy.
Riddle me this then: what role does a robot that has been built to run real fast play in that scenario?
Sure, a good deal of engineering went into this, but the hard part - solving bipedal locomotion - had been done long before that. Apart from showing off it's not really advancing the field and so there's not too much left to be impressed by (honestly, the battery and actuator efficiency that allowed the thing to do a half marathon was MUCH more impressive, at least to me). It seems to me to be more analogous to car tuning.
It will run real fast up the stairs, I guess? Is it a good enough riddle?
Running up the stairs is the easy part after all. The difficult part in such scenario is lack of orientation due to smoke, obstacles like locked doors or fallen debris, unstable walls and ceilings, locating people and getting them out safely. All of those things require a good amount of autonomy, on-the-spot physical problem solving and judgement.
To this effect, the recent DARPA Triage Challenge, which has its final taking place in November this year, seems like a much more thorough and practical demonstration of current capabilities. Something to look forward to if you're interested in the current state-of-the-art w.r.t. real-world applications of robotics.
> A machine is stronger and faster than a human? Shocking. Next we'll learn that cranes can lift heavy loads faster than a human with ropes and pullys.
It’s funny how absurdly dismissive and condescending tech people can be about difficult problems in other people’s fields that they know absolutely nothing about. Numerous developers, informed by maybe a YouTube video, Reddit thread, or equally misguided explainer post on another developer’s blog, have tried to ‘correct’ me about topics in a field in which I hold a degree and have plenty of professional experience. Other tech people might be impressed because they have matching blind spots in their mental models of the world, but people who actually understand, rather than baselessly assuming they understand, see someone being smug about their own ignorance.
"Machines can do stuff humans cannot do" isn't exactly groundbreaking in 2026.
The only interesting part of this story is that this particular machine form factor looks pretty much like a human
It's still not exactly shocking news that it can outrun a human. Of course it can. We're well past John Henry vs the Machine at this point in history
That's the whole goddamn point of this. Fast stable autonomous bipedal locomotion was out of reach of human technology for decades. Since this year it isn't. This was impossible year ago, despite all of the achievements of humanity, cumulative, till the year 2025, included. Now it isn't.
"That's the whole point" that we don't need humans anymore?
Great. I'm a human. You want me to celebrate? No thanks
As for the fear of human labour not being needed at scale due to me as most others needing an income, I'm optimistic there for two reasons. First, large unfed masses tend to start revolutions, something both governments and the not-working are interested in avoiding. Second, large amounts of young idle people has tended to result in stupid destructive behaviour at scale. So I'm confident there will be created opportunities for paid work for mostly everyone, and the conditions won't be too poor as there would be no profit motive to push people too far. Rather, the people having both the resources, time, and energy to consume, would still be what props up the system (until we can agree on trying something better now that we have excellent tools for guaranteeing transparency and optimising allocation at scale in real time).