Staff had to restrain a dancing robot after it went wild at a California restaurant

When we think about the existential threats of new technology, we usually think of something like what happened recently Negotiations Between Anthropic and the Pentagon on how to use artificial intelligence in the military. It’s terrifying to think about, how long will it take before a nuclear weapon can be detonated without any human intervention?

We’ve spent so much time thinking about these potential disasters that we haven’t prepared ourselves for the most pressing threat in our midst: dancing robots.

A dancing robot at Haidilao hot pot restaurant in Cupertino, California, danced aggressively, got too close to the table, and began smashing plates and sending plates and chopsticks everywhere, prompting restaurant staff to intervene. To a video clip It was posted on the Chinese social network Xiaohongshu by user Meooow.

From what we can see of it videoAt least three employees struggled to restrain the robot as it flung its arms. One of Haidilao’s employees appears to be looking at her phone, perhaps trying to toggle something in an app that controls the robot. It could be a robot – which It appears to be an AgiBot X2 robotwhich was Featured At CES in January – it has an off switch, but employees probably didn’t know how to turn it on.

If you are not familiar with hot pot, you should know that, as the name suggests, it involves very hot soup pots. Nobody likes spilled food, but if a robot were to drop bowls of bone broth, it would not only be a cooking disaster, it could seriously burn someone. Not to mention any potential damage caused by blunt force from the automated machine now in operation.

“When the killers sang”Are we humans or are we dancers?“We didn’t realize they were asking us to take a stand in the robot wars of the future.

Haidilao confirmed the mechanical discrepancies in A Statement to NBC NewsBut he denied that the robot was “malfunctioning or out of control.”

“In this case, the robot was moved closer to the dining table at the guest’s request, which is not a typical operating setup,” the Chinese hot pot restaurant chain told NBC News in a statement. “The limited space affected her movement during the performance.”

AgiBot did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Haidilao has experimented…Smart restaurant” in Beijing, which uses robotic servers and gravy mixing machines. And it looks like this Haidilao restaurant was just using this robot Entertainment purposesBut things got out of hand when she danced too close to the customers.

Many startups are working on bringing robotics to the food service industry, e.g shane star, Which works on creating completely independent kitchens. Budo Robotics Bellabota cute cat-like robot, can guide customers to their seats and take out their food when they’re done.

This is probably safer than human bots, at least for now – BellaBot doesn’t have any limbs.