Video of the Week: School of Football by Boston Dynamics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaqzZK7ZrZk

It's how we all learned, isn't it, hmm?

Jumpers for goalposts; Pele, Bobby Moore, Ronaldino? Maradonna's 'Hand of God'? Marvellous.

Here we've got a fresh-faced youngster - one of Boston Dynamics' 'Atlas' robots - watching the greats of football to understand the mechanics of the beautiful game. Alongside legends such as Lionel Messi (but very obviously not Cristiano Ronaldo ...) performing some incredible moves, fans appear in tears or jubilant - and we learn, as Atlas does, that it's all kind of physics. So is it possible for a robot to begin to assimilate the craft?

We'll find out in the coming weeks as Boston, now owned by World Cup sponsors Hyundai, build the tension to a crescendo before the finals. Perhaps this is a bit of a spoiler but I am 99% certain the message at the end will be that robots are plucky contenders but nothing beats the skill and creativity of humans.

This is, currently, true. Whether it will be true when the next men's World Cup rolls around in 2030 is a live question. This week saw Google's Demis Hassabis - Nobel Prize winner for his AI work on proteins which is leading to new treatments for human illnesses - say that he expects Artificial General Intelligence to have been achieved by then. AGI is when machines can do most human tasks at the average human level. There will no doubt be laboratories - probably from China, going on how focused they are on humanoids - which will make it their mission to have a fully autonomous team or two by then, which will have beaten at least one semi-decent human team along the way.

But, in my opinion, Hyundai's conclusion is likely to remain true - that to engender the passion, the VAR-rage, the anguish of defeat on penalties, you're going to still need to invest human emotion in human teams with entirely human traits. It's the history, the memories of Euro '96 (or 1966 or 6th May 1978) that just can’t be replicated. The individual narrative arcs, the global talking points, the image right fights (presumably Ronaldo in this ad ...) and ultimately the human mess of feelings engendered by some people kicking a ball around for a bit, some thousands of miles away.

So yeah - rush goalie, four up front, however Atlas chooses to deploy its new-found skills, human sport is still going to have the edge. And I think that will remain true for the rest of the important human busyness - including deal-making around your most important asset, your home.