Robot runners

From a Wired piece about robots trying to run a half marathon, and failing rather badly:

“The robot immediately twirled in two circles after taking off from the starting line, hit the wall, and dragged down its human operators with it.”

Oh my! The poor dears. Only 6 of 21 were able to complete the race, and those were slow.

What we think of as “robots” are laughably simplistic imitations of the truly advanced tech known as … “biology”!

What a fun story. “Overheating” was a key problem, which is no surprise. Of course they overheated: it’s really hard to manage the heat produced by all that running! Most animals aren’t very good at it, but humans weirdly are. Our amazing thermoregulation means that we “can actually compete with & often beat horses at endurance races.” The “born to run” hypothesis is that we evolved as slow-but-steady hunters, more relentless than our faster four-legged prey. The born-to-run thing is also strongly associated with the (much sketchier) hypothesis that barefoot is better, a major early topic on this website.

P.S. I bet Murderbot could run a marathon. But he’d rather watch his shows.