The shy robot, the wall crash, and a bowl of beans

The clip everyone sent around this week is not the 9.39. It is a robot running the 400 meters with both hands in front of its face, like it just walked in on its parents.

That was Tien Kung Omni, according to Xinhua and Global Times. It won its small-group final in 45.66 seconds. The team says nobody taught it to look embarrassed. In simulation it stopped swinging its arms because the shoulders got too hot, and this is the pose it settled on. A motion-control engineer told Global Times the robot “feels that this is more comfortable.” Which is a very human sentence about a very strange run.

People on the Chinese internet decided a little girl must have shown it how. CGTN ran a piece just to say no, that is not what happened.

The other clip that will not die is older, from training. A humanoid hits a padded wall at full speed, folds at the waist, and throws sparks. Mashable wrote it up before the Games even opened. It is funny in the way a wedding video is funny when someone eats pavement. You wince, then you watch it again.

In the fighting ring the jokes write themselves. Global Times describes robots getting an arm or a leg torn up, standing back up, and then drifting out of the arena because they have lost track of the opponent. The comeback is impressive. The exit is a sitcom.

Gizmodo’s headline this week did the rest of the work: they beat Usain Bolt, then they met a bowl of beans. Sorting, counting, the jobs that do not have a finish-line camera. A sprint is one straight line. A kitchen is not.

We are watching this the same way you are, on a laptop, checking it against the papers. The clumsy parts are not a sideshow. They are the part that tells you how early this still is.