The news of Sony AI's Zürich team, led by Peter Dürr, publishing their research paper in Nature (April 22, 2026) under the title “Outplaying elite table tennis players with an autonomous robot” has hogged global headlines, including in the FPJ, which featured it on the front page in its Sunday edition, April 26. Sony’s Table Tennis playing Robot, called the Ace, is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport, “one that requires rapid decisions and precise execution by employing high-speed perception, AI-based control and a state-of-the-art robotic system”.

In official matches judged by the Japanese Table Tennis Association, Ace won three out of five matches against top university players and held its own against professionals. Experts call it a “ChatGPT moment” for physical AI—the moment machines entered the realm of split-second reflexes and high-precision interaction, once thought uniquely human.

Ace Robot’s breakthrough, coming just after Dr TB Yuvaraja, of Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, performed the remote surgery from India (April 7, 2026) while the patient was stationed hundreds of miles away, reminds me of a 2018 exhibition, “Machined to Think”, at Mumbai’s Nehru Science Centre (NSC), an exhibition I helped conceptualise. The surgery performed by Dr Yuvaraja was India’s first-ever cross-border remote robotic surgery, which resulted in the successful robotic kidney removal on a 55-year-old patient in Muscat, Oman, diagnosed with cancer.

The Machined to Think exhibition presented robots, AI, and automation not as distant science fiction but as evolving realities that would augment human capability.........

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