75
Humanoid robots show rapid advances as they race past humans in Beijing half-marathon
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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Technology
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That's never going to happen the way you imagine. AI can't make decisions it wasn't trained for, and delivering mail in the real world isn't as simple as you think.
Unless you forced everyone to install standardized mailboxes and accepted that important mail won't be delivered to people if their mailbox looks different, got damaged, or is covered in snow.
But assuming it did work, who would profit from AI mail robots?
The people would get worse service, without a human connection anymore.
The postal workers would all be fired.
And as soon as the entire system relies on AI robots, the company leasing them out to the government would increase prices to at least what it cost before, since they've established a monopoly impossible to enter for any competition.
This seems to be the exact direction China is going in.
In major cities, there are increasingly more smart mailbox/parcel pickup points in apartments and central areas. These aren't "forced," but so many essential services are locked behind these private tech platforms.
Originally designed for food delivery drop offs, but you can use them as a mailbox as well.
In a capitalist market economy with a small public sector, that's definitely the expected outcome. In fact it would be worse than you describe. It'll produce big problems with the ability of the economy to consume its production since people rely on wages to buy that production. Wages that woild go away due to automation.
In a mixed economy with a very large public sector, public co-ownership of large private firms, and 10% of the population (and growing) being members of the party that controls it all, the outcome may be different.
AI (or what we call AI currently) is definitely capable of making decision it wasn't trained for, it's the whole reason why LLM are so effective, they learned enough patterns about how humans think and react, that they can apply it to other situations.
Now, if you talk about RELIABLY making decisions then I definitely agree with you. They can't even be reliable with stuff they extensively saw in training, when you get out of the "confort zone" the odds of it taking the correct decision drops fast.
But with AI companies trying to get as much data as they can from their workers and from common people, and with the scary new trend of smart glasses (even though I'm a fan of augmented reality as a concept) we will see how things evolve...
Technology makes possibilities and not outcomes. The idea of a bipedal mechanical assistant that can carry , move and lift items for the elderly , on call 24/7 could be another possibility.
It’s likely things would go as you say. Still there is a possibility that some other applications could come out of this kind of bipedal platform as well.
Delivering mail is a complex task for a machine. This is a technology forum so at some point we should be excited that there are possibilities in the future.
The distance these devices could go gives many more possibilities than a similar platform that can move shorter distances.
My first thought for a platform that could move through human spaces at 13 miles an hour was a military robot for urban combat similar to a terminator. So mail delivery robot is the optimistic version of the future.