Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / A Chinese Robot Just Broke Usain Bolt's 100-Meter Record — and Its Own Industry Says the Hard Part Is Still Years Away

Transcript

A Chinese Robot Just Broke Usain Bolt's 100-Meter Record — and Its Own Industry Says the Hard Part Is Still Years Away · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, where the record falls and the laundry doesn't. On Saturday in Beijing, a Chinese humanoid ran the hundred meters in nine point three nine seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games.
• 0:13
  [Guest] Usain Bolt's nine point five eight had stood since Berlin. The machine that took it is Tiangong Ultra, built by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center. The Associated Press ran it Saturday.
• 0:24
  [Host] Was an American machine anywhere in that field?
• 0:27
  [Guest] Not one. Hold that. The reason isn't engineering.
• 0:30
  [Host] Then start with the track. Race, or demo?
• 0:32
  [Guest] A preliminary heat, timed by the organizers, announced by state broadcasters. No sanctioning federation. In the same week's test runs, other machines lost balance, hit the padding, and got carried off by their crews.
• 0:44
  [Host] Fine. But a year ago?
• 0:46
  [Guest] Same robot, same distance, twenty-one and a half seconds. That is the curve everybody photographed.
• 0:51
  [Host] So the legs are on an exponential. What's on the other curve?
• 0:56
  [Guest] These games ran a household event for the first time, in a real Beijing apartment. Tidy the living room, fold the clothes, wash and hang the laundry.
• 1:05
  [Host] That's the part that would actually change a life.
• 1:08
  [Guest] And they wrote an interruption into it. Mid-chore a parcel arrives, and on a voice prompt the robot has to break off and take the delivery in.
• 1:18
  [Host] How is that scored?
• 1:19
  [Guest] Under the organizers' own rules, if a human intervenes, the entire run is settled as remote control and the weighting drops by half.
• 1:28
  [Host] Hold on. The chores event budgets for a human on the sticks, and the sprint didn't?
• 1:33
  [Guest] The hundred meters was required to be fully autonomous. The laundry gets half credit for a person driving.
• 1:40
  [Host] That's the whole industry, in its own rulebook.
• 1:42
  [Guest] Li Ziye, who runs the games' hotel event, listed what a working building throws at a machine. Unstructured space. Soft goods that change shape. A loaded trolley that's hard to balance.
• 1:53
  [Host] Is anyone inside the industry saying this, or only the officials?
• 1:57
  [Guest] Days before, at the World Robot Conference across town, Unitree's Wang Xingxing gave his first speech since taking the company public. The ChatGPT moment for robots, he said, arrives when you put one in a home it has never seen and it handles about eighty percent of the tasks on voice commands alone.
• 2:16
  [Host] And his date?
• 2:17
  [Guest] Two to three years if things break well, five to ten if they don't. In a fixed setup the success rate is near total. Change the objects or the room and it falls off a cliff.
• 2:30
  [Host] So who should be watching this, specifically?
• 2:32
  [Guest] Hotel housekeepers. The games ran a hotel event too, in a real Beijing hotel. Fixed-station work, the same motion at the same spot all day, is what goes first. Work that changes room to room is the five to ten.
• 2:46
  [Host] Back to that empty American lane.
• 2:48
  [Guest] The Federal Communications Commission put foreign-made humanoids on its Covered List this summer, and a covered model can't get the authorization a device needs before it's sold here. The fastest legs on the planet are the ones a US buyer can't order.
• 3:03
  [Host] So American housekeepers watch a curve nobody here can buy into.
• 3:07
  [Guest] Patrick Deglon's book Unscarcity calls robotics The Body, and it's blunt about the split. Wang's cliff is a data problem. Nobody is quietly logging how humans fold a fitted sheet, and a Covered List keeps one side's machines out of the other side's homes, where that data lives.
• 3:24
  [Host] Beijing timed the legs and the planet watched. The hands worked the same week, in an apartment, for half credit.
• 3:31
  [Guest] For more on the humanoid buildout and whose work it reaches first, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.