In Russia, the machine rages against you.
The battle of man vs machine is heating up. Footage shows the wild moment a humanoid robot lashed out at a man who pushed it in Russia, sparking fears that judgment day is nigh.
The dystopian clip, filmed at Volga Electronics in Saratov, starts off innocuously enough with the bipedal bot strolling up to a male customer who entered the shop.
The man reaches his arm out for a handshake, but the automaton snubs him, prompting the patron to give it a playful shove.
That’s when the robot decides to go balls-to-the-WALL-E. The machine adopts a kung-fu stance, before unleashing a wild kung-fu attack at the offender, throwing a series of kicks and punches like an automated Jean Claude Van Damme.
Two employees intervene and attempt to restrain the rogue robot as it continues to take swings at the customer.
While it’s yet unclear if the attack was genuine — and not a publicity stunt like some other previous machine videos — the wild footage nonetheless had customers talking about the dangers of the tech.
“So we can’t even control a 4-foot robot, imagine later when there’s actual adult-size psycho robots?” said one. “We human[s] are done.”
“The Machines are getting ready to take over. We were warned with the Terminator,” said another.
“These f–king bots are going to kill us for sure!!!” exclaimed a third.
However, others thought that the fight was clearly staged.
“Robots don’t spontaneously do martial arts poses unless they are programmed to do it,” scoffed one naysayer.
Either way, there are plenty of verified instances of humanoids going haywire around their flesh-and-blood counterparts.
This past Spring, a humanoid dance bot was recently performing for patrons at a hotpot restaurant in California, only to end up literally tearing up the dance floor, knocking over tableware, smashing plates, and sending chopsticks flying like something out of a slapstick comedy.
In more injurious incidents, a handler in China was kicked in the groin by an advanced Unitree robot he was controlling, and a droid shockingly slapped a child during a dance demo gone awry.
These machine meltdowns might seem humorous, but techsperts warn that they could have apocalyptic implications as the bots become increasingly embedded in everyday life.
What if, for instance, similar malfunctions occurred around a baby, a hospital patient, or a member of the public during a police interaction?”
“The event would be viewed not as comic relief but as a dangerous systems failure,” Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, a tenured associate professor and computer scientist at the University of Louisville, told The Post. “A glitch in a dancing robot is mostly embarrassing. A glitch in a security robot, delivery system, self-driving platform, medical assistant or industrial machine can injure people, damage property or trigger cascading failures.”
