Nov. 9, 2026
Are you worried about robots taking human factory jobs because automatons can lift more? That might be the least of our worries. Boston Dynamics just revealed a new ability demonstrated by its Atlas humanoid robots.
We’ve seen the Atlas robot dance and execute flawless flips, but now the robot is equipped to steal yet another human joy: dynamic roller skating. The new Boston Dynamics video shows Atlas not just roller skating, but demonstrating a perfect 360 aerial spin in the middle of its skating routine.
Some of the recent AI backlash seems to be gradually filtering down to the robots that AI will drive. For example, during a recent Vogue World fashion show in Milan, robots were used on the runway to introduce some of the latest couture. When the footage was shown online, fashion fans reacted with venom directed at the inclusion of robots in a runway show.
Following the outrage, the designer of the robots-meets-fashion experience, Juan Costa Paz, talked to fashion influencer Louis Pisano to explain the logic of the robot runway invasion.
“We come from this weird tech thing where we are still understanding what tech means to us, and the robots become that almost inevitable force. It’s not going to stop; it is here. So it’s up to us to do what we can with it. We can sit down and just hate on the fucking robots, or we can look at them and say, ‘Okay, what do we do with this?’ You turn the robots into whatever you want to turn them into. Obviously, it’s a sensitive topic. The whole Sam Altman, OpenAI, Claude, and humanity being extinguished in 10 years rhetoric is fucking scary,” said Costa Paz.
“Throughout history we’ve lived through a million of these things. Remember when Steve Jobs took the iPod from his pocket and was like, ‘1,000 songs in your pocket, let’s go’? The entire music industry went into apocalypse mode like, ‘What the fuck am I going to do? It’s going to be the end of us.’ Every time there’s something new like that throughout history, people have that reaction.”
It’s a decent take on robots working alongside humans, but it may still fall flat on the many human workers who stand to lose out when robots like Atlas become the norm in most factories. And now, the blue-collar job-snatching robots won’t just take your human job, apparently, they will do it with style and grace!
Cover: The Atlas robot via Warner Bros./Boston Dynamics/YouTube
