I was there Friday night in San Francisco for the @REK event, and this is something you had be in the room to get it, but I’ll try to describe it. It hit completely differently from robot-versus-robot fights. Those are entertaining, sure, but after a while they start to feel strange. You’re empathizing with machines that aren’t conscious, don’t feel pain, and don’t feel anything. Robot versus human hits different and raw, it was an emotional rollercoaster. I felt real fear for the human fighter, and real excitement, mostly fear, and when it ended there was a huge wave of relief. The robots were remote-controlled, of course, but the kicks were genuinely powerful. We know how power-dense those actuators are, and the human fighter took real hits to his body. The kicks from the six-foot-tall EngineAI T800 seemed nearly impossible to dodge when they were hurled in the right direction. The Unitree H1 was even harder to deal with because its dynamic balance is so good that it just refused to go down. This could be the start of a genuinely new entertainment genre. But I can tell you this: if someone wants to fight a robot with a real AI brain and real perception, you’d need robots that are far less powerful, throttled down, and compliant. Otherwise it ends in serious injury or worse. This is the beginning of something different in robotics and entertainment, and we need to think seriously about it before regulators use moments like this as fearmongering fodder to throttle the entire humanoid frontier.