“The AI Breakthrough That’s Making Humanoid Robots Terrifyingly Capable.”

TheAIGRID. “The AI Breakthrough That’s Making Humanoid Robots Terrifyingly Capable.” Youtube. 17 Sept. 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEtly7wzIvU

This video discusses how Boston Dynamics “taught their Atlas robot to think and act like a human.” It claims that this robot can do complex jobs after being given simple instructions. The video provides imagery that brings the concept to life, showing a robot avoiding obstacles and moving objects as an active participant in the process of achieving a task; the interesting part is the way they claim that this robot is able to effectively complete many tasks at once so that they can actually “think” about what they are doing. The way this is able to occur is through the priority that the robot is good at many jobs instead of perfecting one job. This is something that most robot creators do not consider, but this group found it to be a primary principle in their product. They compare this to a human with many experiences often being more capable of finding solutions to new problems than that of a human who has only one experience to build from. 

I found myself wondering how a robot could be taught to think, and the video addressed this directly through a four-step process. First, the robots are controlled by VR headsets and the robots can watch what is happening. Secondly, they took all of the data collected in the first step and organized it with labels of what occurred and only kept the examples of the robot adequately completing the human task. Then, they somehow “trained the robot brain” by feeding it the organized data, which they described as a simple version of how the human brain works. To finalize this process of teaching robots to think, they gave the robots new tasks to see if the skills were memorized or learned. 

I have to admit, that concept is pretty interesting, and the graphics within the video made a complicated process fairly easy to understand. The idea of going back to step one whenever the robot did a task wrong made sense, and it demonstrated how a learned pattern can be applied in various contexts. For example, if something does not go according to plan, the robot is equipped to handle that rather than just providing the user with an error message; like if the robot were grabbing objects out of a box to move them somewhere else and the box lid closed, it can reopen the lid. The ability for them to adapt in this way is terrifying, as the title implies. What this made me wonder is, what if humans are demonstrating something for the robot to learn, but the robot takes a different lesson from it which negatively contributes to the task at hand? I just fear the actual value of this type of system in the long-term, but overall, this video did a good job of outlining the fact that if a human can demonstrate it, their robot can do it.