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The Question of Robot Safety
An anonymous reader writes to mention an Economist article wondering how safe should robots be? From the article: "In 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot. This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behavior was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer." The article goes on to explore the ethics behind robot soldiers, the liability issues of cleaning droids, and the moral problems posed by sexbots.
Fear the Roomba!
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
...am for guidelines to govern the actions of our new robot overlords.
Narrator: [in movie] Did you notice what went wrong in that scene? Ordinarily, Billy would work hard to make money from his paper route. Then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning the slim chance to perform the reproductive act. But in a world where teens can date robots, why should he bother? Why should anyone bother? Let's take a look at Billy's planet a year later. [The scene changes and a foam hand rolls across an empty football field.] Where are all the football stars? [The foam hand drifts across an empty laboratory.] And where are the biochemists? [The scene changes to a split screen of human and robot couples making out on beds.] They're trapped! Trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips. All civilisation was just an effort to impress the opposite sex ... and sometimes the same sex. Now, let's skip forward 80 years into the future. Where is Billy?
[The scene changes to a post-apocalyptic world. Billy is an aged man but still with his Monroe-bot and still making out with her.]
Billy: [in movie] Farewell!
[He dies.]
Narrator: [in movie] The next day, Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. [A fleet of flying saucers destroy buildings with laser shots.] Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth. Don't date robots!
--Agnostics are those that don't have the guts to admit there are no higher powers.
Beware; those "best wishes" are not such a sure thing anymore. My first tinkering experience involved my Dad and I removing the cheap electric phonograph assembly that produced the voice and rigging a pushpin and a plastic cup to learn how it worked. We gutted him merely for my cursed human curiosity.
I may have inadvertently endangered the entire human species! And with atomic power, no less!
Looks like we'd better start preparing for the inevitable. and get some robot insurance.
The dangers of robots are worse than you think, just watch this PSA. And remember, when they grab you with those metal claws you can't break free cause they're made of metal, and they're very strong.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
I agree, it's not the first. Robots have in fact caused many human deaths, and we choose to ignore this "inconvenient truth" (sorry, Al).
For example, I once heard about a line of automated housekeeping assistants that killed more than one of their "beneficiaries". As I heard it, the victim would lean too close while this robot was drying the clothes; it would blindly draw the front of her blouse into the process, and then start to consume a sensitive part of her anatomy, and she would sometimes die of shock due to the excruciating pain. Over a half century ago such occurrences were commonly referred to by an idiom that signified being in really bad trouble.
They responded by making the robots more intelligent; they were built with sensors by which they might notice that something more than clothing was being compressed; and also, a method and apparatus by which the user might suggest that the First Law was being violated. But these were half measures, and even this lesson seems to have been lost on later generations of engineers.
What is the most deadly thing in America today? If you guessed cancer, AIDS or warfare, you may have guessed wrong. I'm guessing it's these confounded robot ricksha operators that tear along our highways and through our neighborhoods as though no living beings were endangered. Currently they exercise virtually no judgment and require the passengers' continual supervision and correction to avoid disaster. That industry is only now beginning to offer some half-hearted solutions, to detect and respond to obvious violations such as lane departure and excessive closing speed.
You may call me a troglodyte, but I have to ask if we have learned anything from over 150 years of robot design and usage. Personally, I blame evil robotics corporations for not allowing their engineers free rein to build more perceptiveness and gentleness into their products. Are productivity and speed all that matters?
Doing, yes, but not thinking.
sounds like a pretty good description of about 90% of the human jobs out there.
same reason why people always bring up the Moore's law whenever people talk about processor speeds.
You can't handle the truth.
My God! He never took middle school hygiene! He never saw the propaganda film!
He created those laws and then wrote a book's worth of short stories (read: FICTION) showing their pitfalls.
He could have saved much time and gone with the alternate version of the three laws as depicted in Short Circuit:
1)Do not disassemble.
2)Robots are alive and self-aware.
3)Steve Guttenberg is not funny.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
same reason why people always bring up the Moore's law whenever people talk about processor speeds.
Or Godwin's law, like any time at all.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
> It's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building
;o)
> landing strips for gay Martians, I swear to God
Where else do you think the martians got the anal probulator from? Of course, dahling - we gave it to them.
This robot actually sounds to me more like one of natures "thinning out" devices.
...although, it was heard to say "hey sexy momma, wanna kill all humans?", so I'm not sure...
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Self awareness is a side effect of general intelligence. We can't make it yet, but when we can it will be useful.
Of course! The moment we can make general intelligence, it will be a big improvement, for any species.
This whole article, for example, is a case of failing an intelligence check.
Hint: it's not the robot who failed it.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
There was a movie based on I, Robot? Woah! I had thought that there was only a 115 minute commercial advertisement based on I, Robot.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Here, I'll show you... Where did I put my wrench?
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Yes but this robot obayed the zero'th law of robotics
A robot must not harm humanity or through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm
By eliminating this fuckwit from the gene pool, the robot has truely done humanity a great service.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Clearly, it means nukes. Only with the force of Mutually Assured Destruction on our side can we be sure that we could, if push came to shove, defeat our nuclear-armed government. Which is why I advocate providing one free nuclear device to each American citizen on his/her 18th birthday. Only then can we have the violence-free utopian society we've all dreamed of.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
So for the sake of convenience, we should combine the three laws of robotics with Godwin's law. I'd suggest:
1: A robot may not speak of Nazis, nor through inaction allow a human to speak of Nazis...
Blank until
One of the great problems/drivers of humanity has always been that there just aren't enough sexy people to go round. And even if you do manage to get one, fairly soon they cease to be sexy - through age/ over-familiarity.
Previous solution: the oldest profession. Works in some ways, but lots of downsides. Much attacked by moralists, e.g. in the Judeo-Christian tradition, for good reasons of wasting lives/ disease etc.
But as soon as sex robots offer the hope of a solution which avoids many of these downsides, moralists such as the appropriately-named Dr. Christensen attack them before they even exist!
I for one welcome our new robot overlords/ slaves/ whatever we feel like on a given day...
Yeah, I had heard about it :)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
You've really got nothing to worry about as long as their eyes aren't red. That's the only real way to tell if a robot means you harm. That is if the robot has eyes, which they all should for this very reason.
Hold on, hold on, how about all 3 laws into one?
:/
A robot's ability to speak of Nazis grows by a factor of 2 every 18 months!
You can't handle the truth.
This would never have happened if humans had their own personal First Law which was "Protect your own existence". Oh wait. I think we already do have that. Well, I guess this human was just programmed incorrectly.
qntm.org
Actually more than that, it seems as though he actually made a decision to disregard the safety procedures and the fact that the machine was still operating.
This guy should have gotten a Darwin award: the only "flaw" in the robot's safety system was that it significantly over-estimated the desire of its human operators not to be torn to shreds.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
2. A machine or device that operates automatically or by remote control.
Oh I see... like a TV or a VCR?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.