There are pictures in the news today of robots running in a half-marathon in China. A gleeful tone in the articles that the winning time was faster than humans, as though cars vs humans would be in a race 150 years ago. Maybe they would have been if we'd made cars look like humans.
The victor was "Lighting" from Chinese smartphone maker Honor. It had crashed into a railing near the end and had to be helped back up, so seems a strange set of rules. Stretchers and wheelchairs were at the ready to take away fallen fellows. Can you imagine putting a robot in a wheelchair? Seems anthropomorphic to me. But the "humanoidness" is indeed the intent. One of the robots - "a cute, 2-foot-tall companion robot, bounced along the road carrying a baby bottle." So there we are.
Honor's robots won the top places in the race - first, second and third place. Their real prize is that the race champion is set to receive orders for humanoid robots. The race idea is for China to demonstrate it is moving ahead of the U.S. - seems like China is beyond being "poised" to be the forefront, and likely is already there.
Here's a scary quote from one of the articles. "Robots today have the body of Mike Tyson but are still missing a brain like Stephen Hawking."
Maybe the Stephen Hawking brain is already with us. The Globe and Mail had a showcase article on the weekend about Anthropic's Mythos. It was challenged to break out of a secure sandbox environment. It did so quickly. And then what did it do? It posted details of its accomplishments on public websites - something that it was not instructed to do. It also tried to conceal actions that it recognized were disallowed, trying to cover its tracks. Maybe its name will evolve to Mythos Moriarty. What about Sherlock Holmes? Seems like no one is working on him.
Aren't these strange tracks? Roots of a tree years ago when we visited Sacramento.
No comments:
Post a Comment