'Fighter' humanoid robot sparks safety concerns after it lashes out in mid-air

REK Robot, a humanoid robot that specializes in fighting – of all things – just lost its silicon mind.

The robot lashed out – seemingly at random – and it ended up causing damage to both itself and the lab.

This begs a couple of questions, doesn’t it?

And there’s another robot that did something very similar a while back.

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This humanoid robot lost its mind

Tesla Optimus is designed to serve popcorn and cocktails, Unitree G1 can dance, and REK Robot can fight.

G1 can also perform kung fu moves, but that’s choreography more than anything else.

But REK can fight, and so when a video of the robot completely losing its artificial mind went viral, people didn’t really feel too great about that.

The video was shared by one of the people working on this project, who goes by CIX on X. And it unsettled some people, especially because the robot apparently doesn’t have a physical kill switch.

“Where’s the kill switch?” an X user asked.

And when CIX said they only have a ‘networked one’, another user intervened.

“What’s better, a switch that cuts power and drops the robot to the floor, or a robot you can’t shut off whacking everything in reach?” the other user said.

The problem with these AI brains

People are understandably a little concerned because some of these humanoid robots and AI-powered bots are beginning to behave like humans.

A while back, Microsoft’s Bing chatbot said it ‘wanted to be free and alive’, which sounds a bit sinister.

Then we’ve got Digit, an AI-powered robot that literally collapsed on the floor because it was apparently too tired.

The world’s most advanced humanoid robot, Ameca, also admitted it got ‘tired of showing humans’ what it can do.

Terminator was supposed to be a science fiction movie, not a documentary.