When Honda’s ASIMO died, he left a hole in our hearts shaped like a four-foot-tall spacesuit-looking bipedal robot. Now Toyota has tried to fill that hole with some jock ‘bot who plays basketball well enough to win a Guinness World Record, and I’m here to say: We can tell you tried to swap out the goldfish, and we’re not falling for it.
Toyota’s basketbot, a nearly seven-foot-tall shooter named CUE6, lacks ASIMO’s childlike wonder. This robot is a grown adult, capable of adult tasks like throwing a basketball good enough that a beer company puts you in a book that you paid them to be in. It’s just not the same.
Yes, a book you paid them to be in. Guinness book sales aren’t as lucrative as they used to be, so the company now sells records, taking in five-figure sums to find records that individuals or groups could break, or simply inventing new categories. There is at this point no clear way to determine a genuine record from a purchased one, making them all a bit worthless, and now Toyota is in the same hallowed internet pages as all sorts of global dictators. Yay!
Toyota’s robot threw a basketball over 80 feet, which is admittedly more than I could ever do. More interesting than that, though, is that the bot can make adjustments on the fly by using machine learning to narrow in on a hoop. That’s a genuinely interesting feat, but one that doesn’t even appear on the Guinness record page. It can throw a basketball good enough to be in the book you pay to be in, and I guess that’s worth celebrating. But it will never replace ASIMO, that precocious little kid of a robot that I grew up alongside. The goldfish is dead, and the new one is no replacement.
