Robots are getting to do all the fun stuff now too

Human beings are, and have been for our history, tool-using creatures. While hardly unique in this regard, there are plenty of animals that make use of their own tools, we have certainly stretched our own usage far and above that of our fellow Earth inhabitants.

Tools allow us to do tasks that would be more difficult or otherwise impossible with just our physical bodies. Given that our natural toolbox is a bit limited, we have made up for this with the invention of an almost innumerable amount of tools, allowing humans to dominate the natural order of our planet in a way that no other species has.

Many of these advancements make our work much easier, more efficient. Some of our most advanced machines have even eliminated the need for a human worker at all, for better or worse.

Interestingly enough, there’s been a recent shift for our tools to not only replace humans in our work, but also in our recreation as well. AI tools now can create art, replicate voice actors, and solve your daily Sudoku puzzle.

And now they are making the leap into sports. A 3-on-3 soccer tournament was held in Beijing over the weekend. Normally, not a newsworthy statement. However, this tournament had no human players on the field, but rather autonomous, humanoid robots.

To call what these robots were able to accomplish as “playing soccer” may be a slight stretch. They did not so much kick or dribble the ball as they did just kind of run into it, passing was not really possible and there was no real strategy on display other than the basic idea of trying to get the ball into the goal. The childsized bots were slow and often ran into each other in their sole minded quest to move the ball towards one end of the field, sometimes requiring them to be stretchered off the field.

And yet, it was still an impressive feat. Not only could these robot players successfully hoover around the field on two legs, but could even push themselves back up into a standing position after they inevitably fell on their faces. They could locate the ball, know how to move it, and recognize other robots and attempt to avoid them. All without human intervention (outside of the obvious construction and programming necessary before the match).

While any group of four-year olds could have easily run circles around these robots, it was still a remarkable showcase of how far robotics technology has come. And this tournament is not the only sporting event humanoid robots are competing in. Twenty some bots ran alongside their human counterparts during a half-marathon in Beijing in April and there will be an Olympics-style competition called the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games hosted by China in August of this year.

Is the technology anywhere close to replacing the feats human athletes are capable of on the field of play? No, not right now. As I alluded to earlier, it’s probably not even replacing a tee-ball team at this point. However, it is a vast improvement over where the technology was even a few years ago, and with heavy investment into AI and robotics, especially in China, one would expect that improvement will continue at a rapid rate.

And while this is all well and good from the perspective of seeing what we can accomplish and perhaps how that can be applied to making our work easier, I do find it interesting, and perhaps a bit concerning, how much we seemingly are wanting our machines to do not just our work, but also our play as well.

Creating paintings, writing stories, making films, pushing yourself in athletics and pitting yourself against others in competition. For all but the most talented, these are leisure activities, and are usually only considered work if their products can be sold off to the masses. Even in those cases, however, there is usually a human desire to express oneself behind these endeavors.

Which begs the question; why do we want robots to do these things as well? What is the point of an art piece created not from the inspiration of a human, but rather a regurgitated amalgamation of thousands upon thousands of works stolen from humans? Is a perfectly placed bicycle kick or towering home run really as impressive if it is a robot doing it rather than someone who has dedicated years of their life to perfecting a craft?

Don’t get me wrong, the engineering aspect is incredibly impressive and is in itself an art, in my opinion, but it at the very least needs to be supplementary to what we humans do in these fields, rather than a replacement. Doing so would reduce our arts, athletics, what we do for fun and how we express ourselves, into merely work, into just ways to make money. The commoditization of entertainment is already taking us down this path and the use of AI tools to replace artists in these fields suggests that companies have no qualms removing the human factor from these products if it will raise the profit margin.

Perhaps we are okay with this. Perhaps we don’t care about the how’s or why’s behind our entertainment, so long as it is entertaining. The amount of AI art and videos that garner so much traction online seem to suggest as much. But to me it feels like what we are losing in return for such instant gratification is a price far too great.

Are the likes of Mbappe or Messi about to be replaced on the pitch? No. Is there even a real push to do so at the moment? I wouldn’t say so. But we’ve seemingly been fine trading in actual photographers, painters, and writers for machines, so there is little reason to believe that athletes would not suffer the same fate once the technology is good (and, perhaps more importantly, cheap) enough.

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW