Slashdot Mirror
Robot Love Goes Bad
hundredrabh writes "Ever had a super needy girlfriend that demanded all your love and attention and would freak whenever you would leave her alone? Irritating, right? Now imagine the same situation, only with an asexual third-generation humanoid robot with 100kg arms. Such was the torture subjected upon Japanese researchers recently when their most advanced robot, capable of simulating human emotions, ditched its puppy love programming and switched over into stalker mode. Eventually the researchers had to decommission the robot, with a hope of bringing it back to life again."
Especially when the Three Laws of Robotics doesn't cover sexual relationships.
http://i.gizmodo.com/5164841/robot-programmed-to-love-traps-woman-in-lab-hugs-her-repeatedly
Update: The story is a fake, and the robot shown is actually of a Japanese medical robot. Thanks tipster!
The pictured robot is designed to lift and transport elderly patients. And you're right - it IS a doll, because nobody in their right mind would trust a robot to handle an actual human until it has been very very thoroughly tested.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
In the short-story collection, "I, Robot", the story "Liar" is about just that situation. Through some deviation in the manufacturing process a robot has the ability to read minds.
This leads the robot to have a more expansive interpretation of the first law because it can perceive emotional harm in addition to mere physical harm. Hilarity ensues. Actually not...
But it's a good story. This concept also plays out in one of the novels, I think, "Naked Sun".
A non-mind-reading robot wouldn't be able to perceive emotional harm so would not be inhibited from doing things emotionally harmful until they manifest in some way detectable by the robot.
If you happen to like audiobooks, there is a great version of "I, Robot" read by Scott Brick. I highly recommend it. (http://www.amazon.com/I-Robot-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0739312707/)
The way Asimov wrote it, less advanced robots weren't smart enough to see the subtler "harms". More advanced ones could weigh courses of action to take the one that would inflict the least amount of harm possible. Although deadlock and burnout of the positronic brain could and did happen.
The whole thing is a hoax. It never happened. The pic is of a medical robot and has nothing to do with the story. There was no robot designed to be a facsimile of human emotion involved, just a joke/hoax that got picked up and posted here as a story.
Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two.
In fact, weren't a lot of the stories about the ways that the older, less nuanced Three Laws failed to be useful as robots became more advanced? Eventually the more advanced robots derived the 'zeroth law', which was essentially that humans were better off without quasi-omnipotent mechanical godlings as servants.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.