Why Calling It the Robot Olympics Is a Stretch

A robot ran itself straight into a wall this year, and what happened next is the kind of clip that gets shared for the wrong reasons. Carmi Levy has been watching the robot games closely enough to know the wall isn't the interesting part. What he's noticed is a technology moving faster than the label being slapped on it. That label is the real argument. If a person driving a controller counts as an athlete, does a machine with no human touching it at all get to stand next to them under the same word. Carmi Levy and Shane land on opposite sides of where that line sits, and neither one backs down. Somewhere in the disagreement, the conversation turns into a pitch session. Two sports get invented on the spot, built around the idea that nothing has to survive a crash. What they come up with says more about where this technology is headed than the games themselves do. Topics: robot Olympics, esports, robot sports, AI competition, engineering GUEST: Carmi Levy Originally aired on 2026-09-09