Well, both China and the US tech billionaires are feverishly working towards having a personal army of unthinking killing machines that they can deploy unilaterally to a region to massacre a population without any of that annoying “soldiers refusing to kill children”, or “people back home objecting to risking soldier’s lives” shit.

And while what was demonstrated likely didnt include much sensory perception/reaction, it still demonstrated a marked improvement over last years models – similar story when you see their more human-looking things with those weird flesh/muscle wraps that’re like straight outta terminator. I’m also not totally sure about the perception stuff myself, as a few times in the performance it looked to me like the robots responded / adjusted to variances in their partners moves – like a kid who did a flip a bit too low over a sword, and the robot adjusts a bit lower at the last second to avoid a collision.

I don’t think I’ve seen any similar such videos from American companies – like I recall one video from boston dynamics where they had a robot doing a simple obstacle course, and some pre-defined basic acrobatics/dance moves. I haven’t seen anything like what China seems to have available in the (admittedly very high end) consumer market space coming out of western countries lately, though I suppose that could be a marketing bubble/blitz issue.

In the end it prolly doesn’t matter – whether it’s china or the US tech bros, the tech will be massively abused one way or another. Like based on the speed of advancement, you could imagine them having their automaton armies in production by 2030 easy. Then it’s just ‘whoever has more manufacturing power for killer humanoid robots wins’ (paired with ‘who has control of the production stack for those killer robots’, hence the push to grab more land by many major powers). I wouldn’t even be surprised if the ‘elites’ were explicitly aiming for this to occur, to suddenly and drastically reduce the population of the world thinking itll help buy time related to climate damage. Wipe out people in third world countries (see israel, cuba, looks like iran soon), wipe out the poor, thinking itll lower things like gas emissions etc – cutting programs like USAID also fits with this general goal, as it clearly has a negative impact on life expectancy rates “in target countries”, while also freeing up resources for a global superpower to execute things like land grabs while also cracking down on their own citizens aggressively. The tariffs too, trying to re-shore manufacturing and advanced chip fabs, would almost be a pre-requisite, as deploying a killer robots army somewhere would ‘likely’ cause a backlash and supplier cutoffs, if they’re still originating from more democratic states (or ones without killer robot armies of their own). Starlink’s basically a global network allowing control of robot armies dropped anywhere in the world – if countries can’t block it, they can’t easily interrupt robot control functions.

Ok a chunk of that ‘may’ be paranoia, but it’s not implausible in my view. So… yeah, yes I think we should all be a bit worried / concerned. Not that I think there’s much we can do about it.

Why should I worried about what seemed like novel mocap-type technology when I live in a surveillance state dystopian hellscape where roves of masked racist invaders are ripping my neighbors off the street, and the tech companies here are gleefully enabling and profiting off it?

We should be VERY worried about lots of things, but China’s dancing robots aren’t really on the list if you ask me.

I mean I’m equally worried about China and their genocide against e.g. the Uyghurs as I am about the western genocide against e.g. Palestinians or the Russian genocide against e.g. Ukrainians. The problem is with the concept of empire, not any implementation of that concept specifically.

The West engaged in genocide, polluting the planet, their billionaires driving humanity to despair in their greed. The Guardian: Should we be worried about china’s dancing robots?

Ya can’t make me worried about China when I live in America

What a stupid title, lol. Classic “China bad” mentality.
We should be worried if we’re in a dance competition with the dancing robots 😂

Cool! No worries at all :) Nice fluid motion on those robots, everything preprogrammed. Look really nice 🤩

China bad, but…

No worries? I guess???

I think that it’s awesome and congrats to whatever group put that together.

This is an entirely predictable outcome, the only reason that AI robotics have taken so long to catch up to LLMs and image generators is because there isn’t an Internet full of thousands of TBs of text and images to train on.

It takes time to develop the training sets for robots and the easiest data to generate would be human generated so humanoid robots are the inevitable outcome of the data required to train these networks.

Seems kinda boring. Watching robots dance is like watching the microwave do its thing.

Writing was on the wall for dancers when Fortnite took thier moves. This is just the last nail in the coffin. It’s official : human dancers are obsolete (except childten if in service of making robots cuter and less threatening).

Shiiiiiiiiit… I’m worried about finding the best Eggs Benedict in my new city. It’s been 2.5 years and I think I’ve tried about 10 places. No winners.

How concerned should I be when the documentation for complex devices coming out of China always seems to be so bad that no one except the people who designed them can program them anyway?