When we expect concerning the existential threats of latest technology, we’re normally serious about something just like the recent negotiations between Anthropic and the Pentagon over how AI could be utilized in the military. It’s terrifying to take into consideration — how long will it’s before a nuclear weapon could be detonated with none human intervention?
We’ve been spending a lot time serious about these potential catastrophes that we haven’t braced ourselves for the more immediate danger in our midst: dancing robots.
A dancing robot at the new pot restaurant Haidilao in Cupertino, California, boogied a bit too hard, got too near a table, and began smashing plates and sending dishware and chopsticks in every single place, prompting the restaurant’s staff to intervene, according to a video posted on the Chinese social network Xiaohongshu by user Meooow.
From what we are able to see from the video, not less than three employees struggled to restrain the robot because it flung its arms around. One Haidilao worker appears to be taking a look at her phone, perhaps in an try to toggle something on an app controlling the robot. It’s possible the robot — which appears to be an AgiBot X2 robot, which was featured on the CES conference in January — has a kill switch, however the staff may not have known the right way to operate it.
For those who’re not conversant in hot pot, it’s best to know that, as its name suggests, it involves extremely popular pots of soup. Nobody likes spilled food, but when the robot were to knock piping bowls of bone broth over, it wouldn’t just be a culinary disaster, it’d seriously burn someone. Not to say any potential blunt-force damage from the now-moshing automaton.
When The Killers sang “Are we human or are we dancer,” we didn’t realize they were asking us to take a stand in the longer term robot wars.
Haidilao confirmed the mechanical contretemps in a statement to NBC News, but denied the robot was “malfunctioning or uncontrolled.”
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“On this case, the robot was brought closer to a dining table at a guest’s request, which will not be its typical operating setting,” the Chinese chain of hot pot restaurants told NBC News in an announcement. “The limited space affected its movement through the performance.”
AgiBot didn’t immediately reply to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Haidilao has experimented with a “smart restaurant” in Beijing, which used robotic servers and broth mixing machines. It appears that evidently this Haidilao restaurant was just using this robot for entertainment purposes, but things got out of hand when it danced a bit too near customers.
Many startups are working on bringing robots to the food service industry, like Shin Starr, which is working on making fully autonomous kitchens. Pudu Robotics’ BellaBot, a cutesy, cat-like robot, can direct customers to their seats and produce out their food when it’s done.
Perhaps that’s safer than humanoid robots, for now not less than — the BellaBot doesn’t have any limbs.