The future is here and I do not like it one bit.
I try not to be a luddite and hate every new piece of technology. AI has its upsides, today’s computers are incredible, there’s software out there that makes everyday tasks significantly less annoying, safety features in cars have saved countless lives, etc. etc…
But I can’t help but be terrified when I see something like this. Moreso than terrified, I have a fiery urge to burn it all down and return to living off the land, even with all the downsides that brings.
Yesterday, Clone Robotics unveiled the first ever bipedal, musculoskeletal android and it’s impossible for me to dislike anything more.
To briefly set the stage, Clone Robotics is a Polish company whose goal is to create “Musculoskeletal, intelligent androids to solve all the common problems of daily life.” Other robotics companies are trying to effectively create robot looking androids (think Boston Dynamics) but Clone Robotics is literally trying to create new humans… Think Westworld (and didn’t that turn out swell…)
If you haven’t seen this horror yet, prepare yourself for intense spine bristling:
Creepy as hell…
Reading the details on their website makes the future of these “clones” even more daunting.
The company has literally recreated a synthetic human body, with functioning muscular, skeletal, nervous, and vascular systems. You’ll be able to talk naturally with it while it wanders around your house, completing tasks that used to be reserved for us homosapiens.
The Clone comes preloaded with a number of skills, such as pouring you drinks, engaging in witty banter, shaking hands, memorizing the layout of your house and inventory of your kitchen, making sandwiches, vacuuming floors, setting the table, loading a dishwasher, retrieving items, and doing the laundry.
Wait, did I mention the Telekinesis training platform? That’s right, it’ll model any behavior you teach it and turn that into new skills. I’m sure that won’t lead to anything freaky…
Interested? You can reserve your own Clone today! Only 279 are being made so hurry up and get to it!
If I didn’t get the point across already, let me be clear: I hate this.
Is it undeniably cool and a crazy step forward in human engineering? Yeah, absolutely! But does it open the door to humans further burying themselves in increasingly dissociative behaviors (like endlessly scrolling social media) as there’s not even a need to interface with reality through cooking or folding clothes or whatever other “menial” tasks that turn out to be some the last remaining ways a large percentage of people physically interact with the world? Yeah, it kicked that door wide open and who knows what’s walking through it.
We’re already bombarded with tech. We have screens in our cars, on our wrists. Most of us (myself included) do literally all of our work by pressing buttons and staring at monitors from the comfort of our homes. I don’t actually have to even leave my house to live a “real” life, isn’t that already absurd? If you give me a robot that does all the “annoying” things around the house, what would be left for me to do but melt deeper into the world of algorithms, advertising, and internet consumption? We all need to go and read Brave New World again because it’s way more applicable for today than 1984…
You might think I’m being dramatic here, and maybe I am, but that’s a real concern that I, and many others have.
Take a look at some of the commentary about this video and you get a quick understanding that I’m not even the most worried about this latest AI advancement:
Man made horrors beyond your comprehension.
— Casey B. Head (@CaseyBHead) February 19, 2025
As though literature never happened, or was ignored https://t.co/pHlfzAKH9i
— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) February 19, 2025
Counterpoint: https://t.co/F9wzI4I3LY pic.twitter.com/781krOfVAs
— Huey (@HAv2RtrnVdeoTps) February 19, 2025
https://t.co/qUJG8QgVWe pic.twitter.com/hIoRPMimH1
— President Dr RollerGator MVIP PhD (@drrollergator) February 19, 2025
https://t.co/b2vPwwzDVC pic.twitter.com/jLWEbg0s30
— brianna pirre (@bsp_13) February 20, 2025
https://t.co/1iczCx1Op7 pic.twitter.com/kDDGFVggOE
— Fen (@EC_Autopsy) February 20, 2025
This is what you get when people no longer read science fiction or dystopian literature. https://t.co/UUd1r07Zh0
— Rebecca 📖 (@Avonleebythesea) February 20, 2025
“We have finally created the Westworld hominids from the cautionary tale Westworld” https://t.co/FZXi13Cll3
— Aelfred The Great (@aelfred_D) February 19, 2025
Truthfully, there’s no stopping this march into darkness. Look at how far these people have gone in just the past few years. Imagine where we’ll be and what we’ll have in 10 or 15 more, especially because we operate under the “If we don’t do it someone else just will so we might as well do it” mindset, which is easily understandable but inevitably leads to the rationalization of literally any negative behaviors or creations if taken to its fullest logical conclusion.
I’m just one man yelling into the abyss that we should stop this immediately. Most likely it will do absolutely nothing but at least I said my piece.
Tell me what you think about this thing. Am I in the majority or minority who hate it?
I am a writer and I know that naming things is ALWAYS significant.
What’s really interesting about this is that one of the co-founders of this company handle on X is “Necromancer” and “Clone” is a high-level necromancy spell in fantasy games like D&D.
The spell creates a… https://t.co/iMeFU9OO3Q
— Old Hollow Tree (@OldHollowTree) February 20, 2025
