Haaland scored two goals in the dying moments to end Brazil’s reign as five-time world champions, sending Norway through to the quarter-finals in an extraordinary upset that has seen the Norwegians finally break their duck as a team that could win a knockout match at the World Cup. With seconds left, Neymar converted a penalty to pull one back for his country, in what was to be his final World Cup. It’s the stuff of which the game is made: the collapse of the champions, the farewell to a great player, the fairy tale of the little football nation making history. None of it by design.
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But that makes it quite an odd week for RoboCup Federation to make its most cherished promise once again about how by the year 2050, a completely autonomous robotic team will defeat the World Cup Champions. This year’s version has ended in Incheon, South Korea – with the participation of 45 nations, thousands of individuals, robots wearing red and blue jerseys playing with the actual World Cup ball – Adidas Trionda. Boston Dynamics’ robot – Atlas was also present during the same Brazil versus Norway match and walked out on to the field to give the ball to the referee.
If you observe the video from Incheon, however, you begin to see the 2050 claim more as a fundraising mantra than as a road map. The robots all operate at a set speed-walk pace. Scoring a goal involves the robot stopping, finding the ball, computing the angle, then doing it – something that Haaland does automatically in about a half-second, while being pressed by a defender, having never moved from a standing start. If the ball goes out of bounds, the referee yells “stop,” and every robot on the field freezes in motion, like a video is on pause. This isn’t even a replacement for what Norway just won. This is a physics demo in soccer cleats.
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This is not to criticize the technology itself, of course. Multi-agent coordination, computer vision in real time, and balancing biped locomotion are complex problems, and thirty years of RoboCup have made important progress on all three fronts. The technology does contribute to disaster relief and healthcare robotics, of course, which makes those areas worthwhile pursuits. This is exactly what makes “defeating the World Cup champions” narrative so galling: It isn’t really about football. It’s a recruiting slogan and a fundraising slogan cloaked in the guise of sport because “robots that can walk without falling down” just doesn’t trend the same way “robots that play against Messi” does.
A professor at Inha University said to AFP that once you make one Messi-level robot, you can replicate the process a thousand times. Maybe. But no one has yet built a single Messi-level robot, and “2050” is as dubious a date as any other fusion energy development timeline, conveniently far off enough to live past the people who are making the promises right now.
So do we need robots playing football? As research infrastructure with a mascot, sure – it’s a clever way to benchmark AI progress in public, year after year, for an audience that wouldn’t sit through a paper on bipedal locomotion. As a genuine rival to what Norway just did to Brazil? No. Nobody will pay to watch robots speed-walk toward a ball in 2050 any more than they do now. Atlas handing over a match ball in New Jersey was a nice touch. RoboCup should stop promising it’ll ever be handing over a trophy.
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