This piece stars a silicone leg on autopilot, stumbling in a neat little circle. Computer vision tells it where to go, but the destination is: nowhere. It moves, it “sees,” it calculates—but like any good bureaucrat, it never actually arrives.
The Machine That Almost Walks is less an ode to robotics and more a parody of our obsession with artificial autonomy. It limps along, desperately trying to imitate human motion, yet offers none of the meaning behind it. It’s a mirror held up to our techno-fetish: a machine that pretends to be alive, built by a species pretending to know what intelligence is.
Walking—once the most basic sign of life—has been rebranded here as a closed-circuit pageant. Progress reduced to a loop. Motion as performance. Intelligence as cosplay. The machine walks in circles, but maybe we’re the ones going nowhere.
