One San Francisco warehouse has become an overnight sensation after transforming itself into an underground fight club for robots, allowing the humanoids to violently knock ten bells out of each other with an onlooking audience around them.
Forget Jake Paul and his celebrity boxing bouts, the next big thing for the sport could very well involve two humanoid robots beating each other up if underground fight clubs are anything to do by.
Ripped almost exactly out of the Hugh Jackman-led film Real Steel, this new take on combat sports could very well be the revolution that changes how we view the ring, and could have wider reaching consequences for similar forms of entertainment too.
What is the underground robot fight club?
As reported by Futurism, this particular underground tournament is known as 'REK', and is comprised entirely of robots duking it out inside of a cage in the aforementioned San Francisco warehouse.
It was created and is operated by Cix Liv, who is both a entrepreneur in the virtual reality world and a pre-existing enthusiast of robot boxing, and even has a win under his belt in the Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) league.
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There are currently four robots in Liv's humanoid roster, and they are complete with armor, boxing gloves, and even swords to help them emerge victorious once they step into the cage.
Thanks to his existing background in VR, Liv has made it so that the robots are controlled by human 'pilots' using headsets and 'combat controllers' on their arms, making it so that their inputs are directly reflected by the movement of the boxing bots.
He has also revealed that he is working on using artificial intelligence to train the robots on various fighting moves, making it so that they can perform advanced choreography independently alongside the actions of the pilot — let's just hope they don't gain enough sentience to go on a rampage.
Could this be the future of boxing?
Combat sports like boxing and UFC remain a huge attraction and garner hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year, yet Liv certainly believes that his innovation could prove to be the next step, especially in how it blends the sporting and entertainment aspects.
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Speaking to reporter Ashlee Vance on his Substack Core Memory, Liv outlines how he believes that REK "is going to be the next UFC," emphasizing the unique aspect that using robots instead of humans can bring.
"When this guy's walking around and he has full swords, you can feel the pounding in the ground. You know deep in your soul that this thing could kill you. It's like when you see a lion or something and the hairs go up on the back of your neck. Once people can really feel this and see this, it'll be fully mainstream," he confidently asserts.
Bill Gates previously expressed how he thinks that sport will be the one area completely spared from the AI takeover as nobody will want to watch robots instead of humans, yet there is certainly something appealing about watching robots fight to the 'death'.
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It might not necessarily catch on in baseball or football, but Liv could be on to something in the combat sports world — especially when blending it with virtual reality technology that maintains the human element in some capacity.