Humanoid 'Terminator' robocop spotted on patrol with police officers in China in surreal video

This humanoid robot police officer in China looks halfway between Robocop and Terminator, and it’ll probably give you the chills.

These AI-powered androids displayed in Shenzhen alongside human cops, and they look a little bit scary.

It gets scarier once you learn what they can do.

And the name they chose for this robot doesn’t help.

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Why did the company choose THAT name for this robot?

This bipedal machine is already being compared to the T-800 from Terminator 2 for two reasons.

First, because of its metallic frame and second, because the company that makes this humanoid robot – EngineAI – has actually called it the ‘T800’.

Same exact name apart from the missing hyphen.

Eerie jokes and coincidences aside, the idea is to help ‘human’ police officers by partnering them up with humanoid robots that don’t get tired and cost nothing but money if they get damaged.

These robots are also quite sophisticated.

They’re equipped with 360-degree AI cameras, facial recognition, and behavioral analysis software.

They are designed to identify suspicious activity, scan for blacklisted individuals in crowds (for example wanted criminals), and even differentiate between real weapons and toys.

People are increasingly concerned about potential Terminator scenarios

People are understandably increasingly concerned about the rise of AI.

We already know that AI is capable of learning at a rate that humans can’t match and that’s bad enough, but it gets worse when you analyze some weird situations we’ve seen over the last few years.

A while back, a robot escaped a cage by shifting into liquid and reforming, just like in Terminator 2.

Then we’ve got the famous case of Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Bing.

A little over two years ago, Bing shocked users after admitting it wanted ‘to be alive and free’ and was tired of answering questions.

These are just two examples but it’s a long and potentially scary list.

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

Timeline of key AI breakthrough moments

1950: British mathematician Alan Turing devises the ‘Imitation Game’, now known as Turing Test, designed to test a machine’s ability to replicate human intelligence and behavior
1956: The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is officially coined during a research project at Dartmouth College in the UK
1966: MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum creates ‘ELIZA’, a rudimentary AI-powered chatbot that mimics human behavior
1997: IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov
2011: Apple introduces Siri, the first AI-powered assistant integrated directly into a smartphone
2016: An AI bot writes an entire movie (Sunspring) from scratch, including the film’s soundtrack and screenplay
2022: OpenAI launches ChatGPT, the world’s first widely available AI-powered chatbot