These robots can run but can’t stop: Will we ever learn?

The World Humanoid Robot Games, which have just finished in Beijing, weren’t an event; they were a perfect metaphor. Robots ran the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt, but kept running until they exploded into a padded wall. We can create technology to do anything. We just can’t make it stop.

The robots are a mirror to our moment: no exit plan. Strongmen start wars and their technology can achieve all their aims except finish what they have started. Putin in Ukraine, Netanyahu in Gaza, and Trump in Iran now lie at the base of their padded wall.

Humanoids replicate humans in their inability to stop. Five Sydney Swans didn’t know how to stop their big night out. Anthony Albanese didn’t know how to finish the “comic” podcast conversation he had started, and, lacking an exit plan, ended up gibbering about melons . He resembled nobody so much as Lionel Essrog, the character in Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn , who can’t help pushing and pushing a joke beyond its use-by moment. His mentor Frank Minna calls it “tugboating”. If only Albo could have stopped tugboating.

It would be glib to focus on the trivial side of individuals’ compulsion to tugboat. Humanity tugboats its technology on a grand scale of destructiveness. The artificial intelligence which has been thinking on behalf of some of the robots in Beijing is itself a really big boys’ own adventure without an exit plan. Doomsayers fear that we, humanity, will be the padded wall, just as our planet is the padded wall for the past two centuries of industrial pollution.

What was the aim of the World Humanoid Robot Games? Its thousands of competitors were surely not intending to produce a parable of man’s unlimited limitations. Didn’t it demonstrate something useful, and hopeful?

It certainly produced content for social media and contributed more profit to the booming economy of sharable short videos. Human robots have, for now, replaced cats and children in the category of “Look at the funny things they do”.

The Beijing games provided a steady stream of robots pratfalling, exploding, air-swinging, misfiring, and generally making poor life choices. Many of the competitors looked like they should have been tested for alcohol or recreational drugs. Their likeness to humans made them that much funnier. Along with the crowds in the Beijing arenas, you could laugh at the victims guilt-free. Being robots, they died painless deaths and suffered unembarrassing embarrassments. Best snuff films ever.

In this, the World Humanoid Robot Games offered us a distractingly funny human (or humanoid?) face for Chinese technological development. A global audience of Homer Simpsons, we chuckle at those robots. It’s funny because it’s true. In one hilarious humanoid week, China has achieved more than a decade of soft diplomacy.

But aside from providing laughs, social media content, world records and showing that the fastest way to run is to cradle your arms like you’re stumbling through a crowded bar with a tray of drinks, what have the World Humanoid Robot Games given us?

Thirty of the 50 events in which more than 2000 robots competed were simulations of the Olympics and Paralympics.