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The robot squared up to me, jumping up and down, shaking out its legs, before raising its wrists in front of its face like a boxer. It feigned one punch and then another and then kicked, heel out, with force. Thankfully, I was a meter away from it, so it couldn’t actually touch me, but seconds later, it nearly barreled into a man to my right, who squared up to the robot in return.
He found it funny. I did not. That’s not because I’m anti-robot or a killjoy. It’s because I’ve spent a lot of time around robots, and I’ve seen how important safety is to many of the people who develop and work alongside them every day.
Robots, and humanoids in particular, are often bigger, stronger and heavier than most people. When they carry out an action with force, they’re unyielding. Their bodies are rigid and inflexible, made of tough materials such as metals and plastics. They have no moral compass, and no respect for your puny human body. You do not want to get into a fight with one, even though fighting is often the thing they seem to be best-trained to do.
At IFA, the Berlin trade show where the feinting robot took a jab at me, I saw multiple fighting robots on display — several of which were roaming free. The EngineAI T800 robot I encountered was untethered on a walkway on the show floor — I couldn’t even tell which booth it belonged to. Another little humanoid fighter, the PrimeBOT Q1, might only have been thigh-high, but was bouncing around unobstructed, showing off a series of aggressive moves. It had small yappy dog energy, but I also saw it power-march directly into someone’s kneecap without restraint.
Elsewhere at the show, arenas were set up for humanoids to partake in boxing matches. There seemed to be even more robots at IFA than there were at CES or MWC. Even tech companies that don’t make robots had them on their stands to draw in crowds and inspire awe — a kind of humanoid theater, where violence is often synonymous with greatness.
(Representatives for IFA didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether they have rules around robot safety at the show.)
This kind of spectacle has always been popular among humans. Whether it’s animals fighting animals, men fighting men or animals fighting men, people have gathered throughout history, often in great numbers, to observe violence as sport. Perhaps the inevitable next step is to introduce robots into the mix, but it ultimately trivializes what’s actually a scary escalation.
Even when they take human form, robots are autonomous systems, and autonomous systems are already being used widely in some parts of the world to enact terrible violence upon people. Not the kind of violence designed to make people clap and cheer, but the kind that destroys lives and communities. Drones are already widely used by the military, and some military institutions are actively exploring how to deploy humanoids in combat.
Violent autonomous machines aren’t a cause for celebration, and we have a choice about whether to build them. Just because we can, that doesn’t mean we should. We also have a responsibility not to pretend they’re just harmless fun.
I felt genuinely unnerved when the robot squared up to me. I didn’t know what it was capable of, whether it had safety parameters, whether it had any kind of judgment skills and whether it would know when to stop. I very much doubt it would have listened and responded if I’d asked it to back off. After all, the T800 is the same robot that kept swinging even after its head was knocked off in a full-contact robot combat tournament in China last month. I later witnessed an IFA attendee being allowed to square up to the same model of robot in a boxing ring at the EngineAI booth.
When robots are put to work in industrial environments alongside humans, the companies deploying them need to take significant steps to ensure they’re safe to be around people. On a recent visit to an Amazon fulfillment center, I witnessed how all robotic activity was paused when a person needed to enter the zone in which they were operating. And these weren’t even bipedal humanoids.
Robots are still at a relatively nascent stage of development, and safety is one of the things that companies are learning about as they begin to use them in real-world environments. The always-learning nature of physical AI means that robot safety is likely to improve significantly over time. But we’re not there now, which means it’s probably not OK to have them mingling freely with humans while behaving aggressively.
There already are so many ways in which robots are proving useful to humanity, whether they’re taking on dangerous work that currently puts humans at risk, or simply by cleaning our carpets and pools for us, allowing us more relaxation time at the weekends. But robots are also scary, posing both an existential threat and a physical one. Right now, we seem to be leaning into that, glorifying their violence and making them purposefully intimidating largely for shock value.
That doesn’t need to be the case. Robots are machines of our invention. We can choose to make them useful and we don’t have to make them fight. We can also respect their strength by knowing when to keep our distance, and not putting people in harm’s way for the sake of a publicity stunt.
Editors’ note: Katie Collins’ travel costs for the IFA conference were covered in part by Xiaomi. The judgments and opinions of CNET are our own.
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