Humanoid Robot Kicks Small Child in the Stomach During Public Demonstration

I’m not sure what’s inevitably going to spark the great human-robot war that we’ve all seen coming for decades, but one thing is for sure: a video of a robot spin-kicking a little boy in the gut probably won’t be it. Why? Because no one in the video seems to care about the little boy’s well-being, to defend his honor.

I can’t blame them, because my reaction was to laugh at the little boy’s misfortune, and then again at the robot’s embarrassment and shame over what it did, even though it felt neither embarrassment nor shame. What you’re really seeing is the human handlers’ embarrassment and shame as expressed through a robot.

What I’m trying to say here is that the video is a work of fine art, and I fear that by the end of this calendar year, it may become my most-watched piece of media of all time.

Child Struck by Humanoid Robot During Live Demonstration Event

The incident took place in China’s Xinjiang region, where a Unitree G1 humanoid robot wearing a clown wig performed a sweet Van Damme-style spin kick straight to an onlooking child’s stomach during a public demo.

The kid immediately doubled over in pain before collapsing to the ground, with, by my count, approximately three of the several child onlookers giving even a sliver of a f—k about his well-being. The rest immediately returned to delight as the robot backed away from the crime scene.

The child was not seriously injured. Futurism’s Victor Tangerman dug into this particular make and model of humanoid robot, finding that it “weighs roughly 70 pounds and its joints can produce over 100 Newton meters of torque.”

I’m not quite sure how that translates into blunt force trauma inflicted upon a child’s stomach delivered by a robot in a clown wig at a public demonstration, but it seems like enough to hurt in ways that go beyond physical. The psychological and emotional pain of going globally viral for getting the s—t kicked out of you by a robot in a clown wig will likely cause severe psychic damage that will be impossible to undo. They don’t make Wellbutrin pills big enough for that kind of trauma.

But, on the bright side, at least we have now documented the origin story of our future Supreme Allied Commander in the Human-Robot War of 2053.

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