Why a half-marathon is a better robot benchmark than a warehouse demo

A 21.1 km road course exposes failure modes that controlled environments never surface. Beijing is about to run the test again. The demo problem Watch enough humanoid robot videos and a pattern emerges. The robot walks gracefully across a clean floor. It picks up a box from a table. It waves. The crowd applauds. The founder says something about the future of work. What the video does not show: the 40 takes before the clip that made it. The controlled temperature. The surface cali...