These robots can run but can’t stop: Will we ever learn?

August 29, 2026 — 7:30am

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The World Humanoid Robot Games, which have just finished in Beijing, weren’t an event; they were a perfect metaphor. Robots ran the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt, but kept running until they exploded into a padded wall. We can create technology to do anything. We just can’t make it stop.

The robots are a mirror to our moment: no exit plan. Strongmen start wars and their technology can achieve all their aims except finish what they have started. Putin in Ukraine, Netanyahu in Gaza, and Trump in Iran now lie at the base of their padded wall.

Humanoids replicate humans in their inability to stop. Five Sydney Swans didn’t know how to stop their big night out. Anthony Albanese didn’t know how to finish the “comic” podcast conversation he had started, and, lacking an exit plan, ended up gibbering about melons. He resembled nobody so much as Lionel Essrog, the character in Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn, who can’t help pushing and pushing a joke beyond its use-by moment. His mentor Frank Minna calls it “tugboating”. If only Albo could have stopped tugboating.

It would be glib to focus on the trivial side of individuals’ compulsion to tugboat. Humanity tugboats its technology on a grand scale of destructiveness. The artificial intelligence which has been thinking on behalf of some of the robots in Beijing is itself a really big boys’ own adventure without an exit plan. Doomsayers fear that we, humanity, will be the padded wall, just as our planet is the padded wall for the........

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