There are few things more life-affirming than a dancing robot going haywire – The Irish Times

For all the complaints I have about social media, with its ceaseless extrusion of trash into cultural and political spaces, I have to admit that when the algorithm gets something right, it really gets it right. And in my case one thing it has been getting very right in recent months is making sure that I see as many videos as possible in which robots malfunction in absurd and comical ways.

The more that humanoid robots have started to appear in consumer spaces – acting as novelty servers in restaurants, demonstrating dance moves at technology expos – the more such videos have started to appear on social media. Practically every time I look at Instagram, a new one is presented to me for my enjoyment. A disproportionate number of these videos seem to come from China, presumably because this technology is being publicly tested and showcased in China earlier and at a wider scale than elsewhere.

At a technology show in Shenzhen, a robot shimmies on to a stage to the shuffling bass intro of Billie Jean, doing a plausible if basic rendition of some Michael Jackson-style dance moves. Then it attempts to mount a couple of steps to a raised level of the stage; it falls forward headfirst, and briefly sets itself to rights, running on the spot in a sort of skittering cartoon-character mode, before doing a few decent moonwalk-based moves. But then, with a burst of apparently renewed confidence, it attempts the stairs once again, at which point it comes severely a cropper, and lies for what seems a very long time face down and motionless in the spotlight until a handler appears from stage right to the propulsive funk-pop soundtrack of Billie Jean, and hauls the robot’s limp corpse out of sight.

At an event in Shanghai, a similar-looking robot, wearing a cowboy hat and a gold-buttoned waistcoat but no trousers – these robots are often clothed, but for reasons that are obscure at least to me, only ever from the waist up – dances skilfully, surrounded by a circle of young children with their parents. Some fancy footwork is in evidence, but once more the machine is stymied by an uneven ground surface; it trips on a step, and lies there on its back, its furiously spasming arms and legs unsettlingly reminiscent of a capsized cockroach.

These sorts of clips are, in one sense, straightforwardly funny in the immemorially moronic manner of slapstick. It’s a little guy who thinks he’s slick suddenly falling on his ass, and there is, famously, nothing funnier than that. But there is also a strongly uncanny, even unnerving, edge to these pratfalls. There is an appealingly human quality to a small and fitfully nimble robot, showboating like a stage-school kid for an adoring crowd; but the moment the inevitable fall arrives is also the precise moment at which the illusion of humanness disintegrates, and the machinery is laid bare by its own sudden malfunction.

And then there are the many, many videos in which a robot, in the middle of demonstrating its prowess in some or other physical form – t’ai chi seems oddly popular – suddenly takes a notion to start assaulting people. I have seen multiple videos in which a robot, in the midst of demonstrating some or other set of deft moves, attacks without provocation a small child. Sometimes the attack appears entirely accidental, as in one video where a robot giving a little ballet recital, botches a pirouette in such a way as to slap a young boy square in the mouth in front of his horrified parents.

There are also many other more actively aggressive scenes, in which a robot suddenly and for its own impenetrable reasons chooses violence. If you search for “robot attack” on Instagram, for instance, you will immediately be presented with multiple recordings of humanoid robots attempting to drop kick children in the face, sometimes with shocking success. (Children seem to receive the worst of these attacks, perhaps because they tend to get closer to the robots and have worse defensive reflexes than adults, and because they are lower down and therefore easier to drop kick in the face.)

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None of these latter videos would be funny if anyone seemed to actually get seriously hurt. In a way, there is an undercurrent of weird menace to them all the same, because they stage, in their buffoonish manner, an anxiety that is about as old as technology itself: the anxiety of rogue machines. (The word robot comes to us from the Czech word robota, meaning forced labour; it was coined by the Czech writer Karel Capek, whose 1920 play RUR is about self-aware humanoid machines rising up against their creators.)

A decade or so back, the internet was awash with another kind of viral robotics video: the clips that emerged from the company Boston Dynamics. Those videos – clips of four-legged mechanical creatures carrying loads over piles of rubble, squat dog-like monstrosities galloping at horrifying speed – were unnerving because these uncanny beasts were clearly built for purposes of war, and because they seemed like a kind of absurdist mockery of nature itself, like the unholy creatures of a military-industrial Dr Moreau.

This new proliferation of robot content is far less unsettling, even though, ironically, it comes at a time when our anxieties about so-called intelligent machines are more acute than ever. The robots in these videos are, for all their flashy dance moves and cutesy appearance, far less sophisticated than those Boston Dynamics prototypes: they’re essentially kitschy toys, intended for novelty consumer use.

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There is something reassuring, for instance, in a video where a dancing robot waiter goes haywire and smashes up a restaurant, or loses the run of itself and starts lashing out blindly at kids. It functions, among other things, as an antidote to the relentless propagandising of the tech world, with its insistence on AI as an inevitable replacement of human labour. It reveals, in its farcical way, that this technology is – for now at least – nowhere near where it would need to be to start replacing human labour at scale.