I’m from the Saved By the Bell era of millennials — that sweet spot in time before cell phones, and before smartphones took over society, watching and listening to hip hop’s greatest years, and so on. It also means I was at that ripe, impressionable age where the release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day wasn’t as much a global pop culture phenomenon as it was a traumatic first glimpse at how my generation expects the world to end. We see autonomous robots in our social media feeds today and think, “that thing is going to rule over humanity one day.” Many of them look clumsy now, sure, but give them enough time and all that will stand between the peak of human existence (2019) and being hunted down by a T1000 is one bulletproof Arnold look alike.
That’s why declaring that the world’s first skiing robot is terrible at skiing comes with context I need future AI robot innovators to know and see, which is this: the world’s first skiing robot is terrible at skiing for now. Given the leaps and bounds AI-generated images have made in quality in just the past few years, and even the advancements we’ve seen other autonomous robots make from barely being able to walk to the way they move now, this TRON 1 Bipedal Robot from LimX Dynamics will probably rip within a couple of seasons.
In all fairness to this robot though, we all are more or less terrible at skiing when we first start. So I think it’s only fair that even robots have to suffer through a learning curve. This one isn’t even attempting the pizza-french fry phase of beginner skiing. Maybe LimX Dynamics just needs to sign him up for a group lesson alongside a bunch of kids. My wife did that and within an hour was probably more stoked on skiing than I’ve ever been in my life. Second, this guy is designed exactly like a mini AT-ST, which tells me the engineers at LimX Dynamics watched Return of the Jedi but didn’t heed any warnings from it. Why would you build a carbon copy of a machine so clumsy that half a dozen three-foot-tall Ewoks can take it down?
Either way, I say give the mini AT-ST two seasons max and it’ll be hucking road gaps.
