> Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly.

Big sports events are the "circenses" part of "panem et circenses" [1]. Fun fact concerning this: the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten" (to keep at the bottom), i.e. to keep the mass of the populace at the bottom, or in other words: to prevent the mass of the populace from coming up.

> Would anyone watch these robots in competition?

I have seen robot fight competitions both live and in videos, and I have to admit that these are not boring to watch.

So yes, with a proper marketing I can easily imagine that lots of people would love to see broadcasts of some robot competitions.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

> the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten"

No, that would be "Untenhaltung", which isn't an actual German word, but could be.

"unterhalten" in German can both mean to entertain (however, not as in "entertaining a notion") having a conversation, as well as "to maintain". It has several meanings, all of them positive.

To be fair, most robot turnaments are still very much about human intellectual and engineering achievements. The robots are just a vessel