Melissa Chen(@MsMelChen):People laughing at the Chinese robots crashing after the 100m race or asking what's the point of developing humanoid robots even are missing the bigger picture. Remember when JFK said: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." <<BECAUSE THEY ARE HARD>> Human locomotion, let alone a full blown sprint, is mechanically very hard. A two legged robot that has to balance on one foot repeatedly, predict where its center of mass is moving, absorb impact, coordinate many joints and correct errors within milliseconds, is solving problems at the absolute edge of physics, control theory, and real-time intelligence. When you iterate and solve these problems, regardless of how impractical it seems, you go a long way to advancing a frontier of what machines can be in the physical world, of knowledge than can open up far more applications you don't even know exist yet. That's what the goal of putting a man on the moon did for NASA and the USA. This is a Sputnik moment and we are still laughing and dunking on crashing robots and canceling data centers over climate concerns, the very infrastructure required to train the models and run the simulations that would close the gap. Shaun called the gap existential because it is. Nations that treat hard problems as serious problems shape the future. Nations that stand by and watch do not. We used to know this.

2026.08.23 12:53

People laughing at the Chinese robots crashing after the 100m race or asking what's the point of developing humanoid robots even are missing the bigger picture. Remember when JFK said: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." <> Human locomotion, let alone a full blown sprint, is mechanically very hard. A two legged robot that has to balance on one foot repeatedly, predict where its center of mass is moving, absorb impact, coordinate many joints and correct errors within milliseconds, is solving problems at the absolute edge of physics, control theory, and real-time intelligence. When you iterate and solve these problems, regardless of how impractical it seems, you go a long way to advancing a frontier of what machines can be in the physical world, of knowledge than can open up far more applications you don't even know exist yet. That's what the goal of putting a man on the moon did for NASA and the USA. This is a Sputnik moment and we are still laughing and dunking on crashing robots and canceling data centers over climate concerns, the very infrastructure required to train the models and run the simulations that would close the gap. Shaun called the gap existential because it is. Nations that treat hard problems as serious problems shape the future. Nations that stand by and watch do not. We used to know this.

Shaun Maguire@shaunmmaguire

2026.08.23 03:14

America is incredibly far behind in robotics This is existential

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