Chapter 1: What record-breaking achievement did the robot Lightning accomplish?
This is The Guardian.
Last month at the London Marathon, Sebastian Saway smashed the sub-two-hour barrier, shaving 65 seconds off the previous fastest time.
An historic performance, 159.30. Absolutely incredible. I've never seen anything like that.
But it wasn't the only record-breaking race that caught the world's attention in April.
It was human versus humanoid. More than 100 robots racing against runners Sunday in Beijing.
In Beijing's half marathon, a robot named Lightning beat the human record by a whopping seven minutes. It's just the latest in what feels like an acceleration of robotic breakthroughs powered by AI. And the country racing ahead of all the others? Lightning's birthplace, China. But beyond running really fast, what do we actually want from robots? What will it take for them to get there?
And are we ready for what happens when they do? I'm The Guardian's science editor, Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly. Amy Hawkins, you're The Guardian's senior China correspondent, and you've been looking into China's robotics boom. So first of all, who is this company behind the half marathon robot? Have they been in business for years or are they new? What's their story?
So they're a company called Honor, which is actually a smartphone company, which has only recently within the last year or so pivoted into robotics and embodied AI technology. which is what people are calling robotics. I think that shows just how fast the sector is growing in China.
It's not even one of the big, more famous robotic companies that so many companies are trying to get in on this moment. China's got a much more sophisticated and low-cost manufacturing supply chain. So the parts of the supply chain that are needed to build these robots is very readily accessible in China, and it gives China a bit of an edge in that part of the AI race.
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Chapter 2: How is China leading the charge in robotics development?
I mean, how are they trying to tackle, for example, this issue of a robot having to navigate a space that it's completely new to, it hasn't been in before?
If you think about large language models, which we're all familiar with, like chatbots, they're trained on a data set, which is kind of almost unlimited. It's all the text on the internet and They can have so much data to train their models on, but for robots, which are trying to figure out how to move through space, it's a lot harder for them to acquire
the data that's necessary to train sophisticated models. There's a company that are approaching this in a few different ways. I spoke to a company recently that has invented a glove that a human being can wear to do various tasks like cooking and cleaning and peeling a banana and folding laundry.
And this glove is fitted with sensors which can then harvest that data and that glove can then be put onto a humanoid device robot hand and the humanoid can learn from the data in the glove how to do certain tasks. That's one way. Another way is some companies are paying human beings to wear kind of GoPro cameras on their heads while they do daily tasks and they film all this data.
And then that is fed into what's called these world models. And some companies are building 3D worlds in which to train their robots about how to navigate space. So there's a few different approaches and companies are each taking a bet on why their approach is going to work.
Robots are making massive strides, but what will it take to get them from running and dancing to washing our dishes and fixing our sinks? According to many roboticists, it comes down to just one thing.
It's the hands that are the critical thing. They're the things that come into interaction with the environment and do the work.
Nathan Lepore is Professor of Robotics and AI at the University of Bristol. And his focus is exactly what many of these companies are grappling with. How to give robots what he calls human-like dexterity. He told me where the field has got to so far.
When I first started in the field maybe 15 years ago, it seemed like this kind of distant dream, and you couldn't really see how it was going to happen in the short term. But things are moving so fast in robotics now with AI, new hardware, new fabrication methods. We're getting close.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do robots face in achieving human-like dexterity?
And so this will start hitting some of that labor, some of those jobs, because at the moment people say, well, look, if you want to survive, you know, the AI revolution, what you need to be is like a plumber or an electrician.
I don't worry too much about this because, you know, the evidence in the past is always when one type of job stops, you know, their kind of work gets displaced into other valuable activity. There are other concerns of what will be done with those robots as well. You know, what's their use within society? So humanoid robots with hands, you know, they can be very useful as assistants for us.
But, you know, on the other hand, you know, they can be used as soldiers. They could be used, you know, in security operations. It's a powerful technology, and I think we'll need to see how that develops, and probably some controls will need to be put in place by governments as these technologies come through.
I was wondering if we will all end up getting jobs repairing robots, but then I thought, well, no, there'll probably be robots to do that, won't there?
Are you absolutely right? The big change to come is when robots will be building other robots. Once that happens, the cost of a robot should come down because you won't need humans. At the moment, all robots are built by humans. Sometime in the future, robots will become dexterous enough that they will be rebuilding each other and improving those builds as well.
That can be done with AI, you know, on a kind of self-sustaining loop where the robots will become more dexterous.
Coming up... China's robots are racing ahead. Can humans keep up? Amy, China is obviously leading the way in this sector. Where does the government see all of this going? Where will these robots fit into society?
China does already have what some people call dark factories where they're entirely staffed by robots and so you don't need to turn the lights on. And those will be factories in which the tasks are very kind of repetitive.
simple tasks where they've decided to use robots rather than human workers but for sure kind of part of the push towards developing more and more sophisticated humanoid robots is to get them to a place where they could replace human workers in jobs where they can't currently replace them you know what the government's really worried about is actually it's got a shrinking workforce because of the aging population so you know it's worried about not having enough workers to
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