Slashdot Mirror
Volkswagen Factory Worker Killed By a Robot
m.alessandrini writes: A worker at a Volkswagen factory in Germany has died, after a robot grabbed him and crushed him against a metal plate. This is perhaps the first severe accident of this kind in a western factory, and is sparking debate about who is responsible for the accident, the man who was servicing the robot beyond its protection cage, or the robot's hardware/software developers who didn't put enough safety checks. Will this distinction be more and more important in the future, when robots will be more widespread?
Time to welcome our new robot overlords.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Will this distinction be more and more important in the future, when robots will be more widespread?
The regular safety measures weren't in place because they were installing the systems, so most likely they had people working on different things and someone started testing their piece without realizing it was already connected.
The more significant thing from a Slashdot point of view is that Financial Times writer Sarah O'Connor tweeted about it yesterday which coincided with the release of the new Terminator movie and it blew up into a somewhat inappropriate (someone did die) Twitter storm of SkyNet jokes.
fencepost
just a little off
The title of this article is somewhat misleading. It says that a worker was killed by a robot - which would suggest a technological problem.
However, the article states that:
"...officials believe that human error was to blame for the incident, rather than a problem with the robot."
Perhaps the title should read something like "Fatal accident caused by a human involving robot at car factory"
Regardless of the title, it is still very sad that this happened.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Really Slashdot editors....
Try 1979 at a Ford plant in Detroit.
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-sear...
Really it is a new low when the editors on slashdot can not be bothered to use Google
.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Machines kill people all the time yet this story is getting a lot of traction because it plays into the 'evil robot' narrative. I've seen some pretty evil automobiles, chainsaws, and escalators.
Automated devices can always be dangerous. This is the case with any mechanised factory.
The company has a duty to produce and enforce health and safety rules. The employee has the duty to follow these rules and apply basic common sense. If both of these conditions are met, accidents will still happen, but nobody is really to blame. That's why they're called accidents. We can't predict everything.
Back in my day, we only had 3-laws, and we liked it!
And how long will it be before all of us simply get in the way?
Are you kidding me? No, it is most certainly NOT the first severe accident with industrial robots. Seriously, thousands and thousands of factories using them, why in the hell would anybody think for a second that accidents had never before happened??? I guess the submitter is so sheltered that he has no clue at all about what it is like to do physical labor in a place that makes actual things!
There was another story in the UK news today that an industrial waste shredder killed a worker that crawled onto the conveyor belt for some reason - in both examples, the worker was inside the exclusion area without ensuring the area was safe and the machinery was isolated, and in both cases we are dealing with automated machinery that just simply carried on with its job, yet only in the Volkswagen case are "questions" being "debated".
Bollocks, the worker is to blame for not following the procedure for ensuring the machinery was safe to work on. And if the procedure had infact been followed and the machine violated that procedure (eg the worker set the machine to off and isolated it, but the machine started up anyway unexpectedly) then the company responsible for ensuring the machine follows the safety procedure is to blame.
You do realize this was a simple yet tragic industrial accident, right? Industrial robots have no intelligence and the most rudimentary feedback control systems. You can't program asimov's literary devices into an industrial robot. The robot doesn't have any clue what "human" means -- it simply moves in programmed patterns. Industrial accidents happen when physical barriers are not respected. If the person in question bypassed the barrier system (eg put a shim in place of a sensor so he could work near the operating robot) then there is no way a lawsuit should be brought against the manufacturer. If the device/installation was missing basic safety precautions then there may be a case for a lawsuit against the manufacturer, installer of the robot, or auto manufacturer. Depending on who neglected the safety precautions. Regardless this has nothing to do with pseudo-"laws" of robotics or anything else remotely related to artificial intelligence. This is an industrial accident that could just as easily have happened with a band saw or CNC mill or lathe.
the arnold schwarzenegger move "terminator genisys" is in theatres and hollywood wanted a really effective advertising stunt
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think in this case it's different because the robot has an arm and hand (so to speak) capable of grabbing you, and a lot of possible complex movements, so it's much less predictable than, say, a press with respect to the safety of people around it.
This it perhaps the first severe accident of this kind in a western factory, and is sparkling debate about who is responsible for the accident, the man who was servicing the robot beyond its protection cage, or the robot's hardware/software developers who didn't put enough safety checks. Will this distinction be more and more important in the future, when robots will be more widespread?
Folks, there exists an entire and oft maligned profession that is dedicated to figuring just this sort of thing out.
This isn't some big unsolved existential question. It's a fairly dry exercise in interpreting and applying precedent in new ways. Humans are actually reasonably good at sorting out how to deal with the legalities of new things.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
On 25 January 1979, Robert Williams (USA) was struck in the head and killed by the arm of a 1-ton production-line robot in a Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, USA, becoming the first fatal casualty of a robot. The robot was part of a parts-retrieval system that moved material from one part of the factory to another; when the robot began running slowly, Williams reportedly climbed into the storage rack to retrieve parts manually when he was struck in the head and killed instantly. Robots pose a significant work-place risk, despite safety measures introduced to limit injury. In 2005 in the UK alone there were 77 robot-related accidents.
Robert Williams was the first human to be killed by a robot
Kenji_Urada was a Japanese engineer who was one of the first persons reported to have been killed by a robot in 1981
Whoosh!
Asimov did have three laws, you are correct. I was looking at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council which has 5 rules. I guess I miffed the joke a bit but I hope it was still good for a chuckle.
So, a millennial?
A decade or so ago in England a combat robot got out of its cage, found its way out of the facility, and was caught heading down the street. (I have a news link somewhere.)
Safe: Turned off
Unsafe: Any state where it might possibly begin operating
Seems predictable enough to me.
Perhaps, three laws of Robotics framed by Isaac Asimov should be inbuilt any such system.
I bet you were the kid at school who told everyone Santa Claus wasn't real.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I've been in manteinance in a car factory, and standards are quite simple and secure. You don't enter a âoerobotized cellâ without physically locking the restart key, which is typically besides the door lock. That way you ensure nobody will think the cell is empty and restart production.
I've been in the Wolfsburg plant and it's a modern one, with quite squared workers, so it's very strange that it happened there. In my work life, I've seen reports of this happening twice, albeit not in western plants; it has allways been a breakdown intervention where the worker didn't follow the security rule.
We could. They will just have to run around wearing hats with 'Wizzard' emblazoned in sequins.
Free Pie! The Pie is Also Evil!
If the robot must be moving (typically, when you're teaching the robot the path it should follow), then every single person in the workcell must have an active deadman switch (anyone lets go, the robot emergency-stops). And you run the program at 10% speed so that you have time to trip the deadman or get out of the way. The workcell itself is fenced off, usually with either a tripwire or electric-eye switch that will e-stop the robot if triggered.
I used to work for a robot company, and we enforced these rules religiously. When I went to visit plants and work on the robots, they issued me my own padlock and tags for lockout/tagout. Someone had to have skipped some safety procedures in this case.
Indeed, in most places, a bug where the system crashes is the most severe possible bug. When dealing with robots, that's only the second most severe. The most severe were "unexpected motion" bugs, where the robot didn't follow the path in the correct way or otherwise didn't behave predictably. Those got everybody's attention.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Back in my day, we only had in-laws, and we hated them!
I bet you were the kid at school who told everyone Santa Claus wasn't real.
Wait...what? Santa Claus isn't real?
So now the machines are racist (see google image tagging) AND violent. They're qualified to be cops now.
Pretty clear, according to my understanding of OSHA liability in the US anyway:
"...the man who was servicing the robot beyond its protection cage..."
Lock out/tag out and energy isolation (ie unplugging, as well as well as releasing/securing stored energy (compressed gases, springs, kinetic, etc) is ABSOLUTELY the responsibility of the service person.
-Styopa
C'mon folks. This is basic stuff when working with any hazardous machinery. This is entirely a human error, and the 'robot' aspect of it is unimportant. The word 'machinery' would have been less provoking. It's about the same as saying "Factory worker dies after jumping into industrial tire shredder with insecure controller hardware". The controller has nothing to do with it.
Granted, Europe doesn't have the same OSHA requirements as the US, but still, it's pretty obvious.
If you're not familiar with this concept, here's a summary & scenario.
Summary: You use a device to physically stop the operation of the machine that requires a lock, and then you keep the key to that lock with you so only you can re-enable the machine.
Situation: You need to rewire half a building. You shut down the power and lock the panel so no one can turn it on. You start work and now your hands are full of wire. At the same time, a co-worker's air compressor loses power because it's plugged into that downed grid, he comes over and wants to turn it back on, but since you have the only key, he can't. As a result, you stay alive. Alternatively, you don't lock the panel, and your co-worker electrocutes you.
I can't believe I heard about this story on the radio this morning, with the radio hosts likening it to the movie Terminator. I work in industrial automation and let me assure you that these industrial robots have absolutely nothing even remotely approaching "AI". An industrial robot is no more than a multi-axis motion control system with some fancy co-ordinate transformation math on top of it. The programs are as simple as "wait for this input, then move to this point, turn on this output, wait for this input", etc.
When we're starting up any industrial automation workcell (whether it as a robot or not), the cell design has to be certified (stamped by a professional engineer in our jurisdiction) that the safety system meets appropriate regulations and is built with certified components, all of which are specified to specific safety requirements based on hazard, etc.
The thing is, those regulations are there to protect factory workers and people interacting with the cell in normal operations. If you take any machine apart using a wrench, you're supposed to be properly trained in how to lock out all sources of energy in the machine. That said, when you're programming the cell, you're allowed to be inside the cell and power up the robot using a teach pendant with a special enabling switch you have to hold down. This requires you to put the robot in a special teach mode which also limits the robot speed to less than 250 mm/s. If the cell was built correctly, the interlock switches on the gates have to be wired into the gate inputs on the robot, and when you open the guarding, the robot can only be energized while in teach mode with the teach pendant enabled.
The system isn't fool proof. We all know impatient people. Maybe the person programming the robot didn't check that the gate switches were wired in properly, or maybe he asked his buddy to close the gate behind him and press the reset button because he wanted to see what was going on (something I've seen several people do, and have always chastised them for). Maybe the guarding wasn't completely installed yet. Maybe he mistakenly put it in "Teach 2" mode which allows full speed operation with the teach pendant enabled. This mode is generally illegal in the United States, but some jurisdictions do allow it as long as you take other safeguards, like striping out a dedicated area on the floor where the robot can't reach where you're allowed to stand.
That's why this is most certainly human error. The question is, who is liable? Did a manager pressure the guy to continue programming the robot even though proper safeguards weren't in place? Did he just get impatient and ignore his own safety training? I see lots of people do that, and I also see lots of people with missing fingers - go figure.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
It's a simple, if tragic, industrial accident
Nobody said the opposite.
FUD about completely fictional (and in this case entirely absent) AIs
Nobody ever talked about AIs behind that.
pandering to the fears of people who are afraid they will 'take over'.
Only valid for stupid people.
Well, maybe one half still has get to get used to is, but in general it usually is.
bickerdyke
sparkling debate about who is responsible for the accident
The Audi/VW group has waaaaay more money than the robot manufacturer. I bet I know who the deceased's family sues for compensation.
This issue was covered in quite a bit of depth in the 1997 book "The Case of the Killer Robot" by Richard G. Epstein. It was a great book and covers social, legal and ethical issues relating to responsibility of robotic “accidents" that result in human deaths.
- Ben Bederson Professor Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Lab University of Maryland
the Tech forget to set the lockout on the bot till he was done and out of the way.
The manufacturer of the robot should be prosecuted if they didn't add the five laws to its programming.
Uh... three, sir.
I think stories like this are gaining traction because:
1) People see a robot as a relatively new, advanced, and expensive technology and
2) People feel that relatively new, advanced, and expensive technologies should be built in such a way so that these types of things don't happen
How much extra $ would it have taken to install a set of sensors that would make sure the robot wouldn't perform if a human was in the way? Relative to the cost of the robot, probably not all that much. At least, that's probably what people are thinking. Whether they're right, I can't say. Still, it isn't an unreasonable thought.
They don't think this about old or inexpensive tech because they are familiar with the dangers and/or realize it isn't necessary cost-effective to change it. For example, a kitchen knife that wouldn't cut a person, but was still very effective at kitchen tasks probably would be cost prohibitive.
In a UK factory, the bot would have yelled "EXTERMINATE!" when it grabbed the guy and crushed him.
In this case, Western is referring to Western culture rooted in Greece & Rome, spread throughout Europe, and was brought to the Americas. If you think about early people coming out of Africa into the Middle East, some of them went west toward Europe and some went east toward Asia, hence the Eastern and Western cultural labels. Here is a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
I think the relevance is that a man died in a accident with a complex and autonomous machine (properly called "robots" since they exist in factories, like it or not), and that's not so easy in this case to predict everything that can go wrong, like, say "don't put your hand inside the press". Also, it's not so easy to say if the safety considerations are in charge of the user, or the machine's designer, and in what percentage.
"...officials believe that human error was to blame for the incident, rather than a problem with the robot."
The root cause of all problems like this is human error. If you haven't reached the place where there was a mistake by a human then you haven't gotten to the root of the problem. Might be bad machine design. Might be faulty programming. Might be operator error. Might be disregard or ignorance of safety protocols. Might be some combination of the above or a few things I haven't mentioned. But any failure in a machine made by man ultimately is the fault of a human. Might be an innocent mistake and the failure may not necessitate punishment but it will be human error make no mistake.
100101100010010100001 01010001101 0100000 11101010100 0101000101 0100010 1000101001010 1010001 01010101001. Bzzzt.
I for one welcome our new comedy overlord.
Germany is western?
Yes - I believe it's somewhere between Dodge City and the Sierra Madre.
That's sort of the point of most of his works... They don't actually work the way we expect.
Usually it ends up with the situation being explained by the robot
You repeated what GP said.
Yes, practically all nations with the German culture are given the western technology group. You don't start getting into the eastern or Islamic technology groups until you hit Poland or the Balkans.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Another story that would get a lot of traction would be if someone got killed by a tiny green cartoon character with two antennae and a single eye. That would play into the 'evil plankton' narrative.
You are thinking of Germany relative to your perspective. Realize almost 60% of the world's population lives between Japan, and Eastern Europe, with most of the rest in Africa, Europe and the Western Hemisphere.
Western refers to society based on culture, laws and values that developed in Europe, starting with Greek and Roman civilizations, and shaped by Christianity (Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox), the Enlightenment, and the French and American revolutions, and dozens of wars and cultural movements in between. Western civilization refers to any country found in Europe (including Russia) and civilizations largely dependent upon Europe for it's founding, especially the entire Western Hemisphere and Australia which are largely populated by Europeans or natives who lived and were educated in societies ruled by Europeans.
When I read it, many will say 'robots are unsafe'. I read 'robots are safe, because only NOW does it happen for the first time.'
That said, replace robot with machinery and these kind of things happen all the time. People are where they should not be. People do not follow safety procedures for various reasons. People die.
It is realy nice how it is written in a way that is clearly intended to bring up an idea of a robot willfully and with determination grabbed a person and killed that person. If that were the case, I do not condemn the programmer, I aplaud him for being the first to have made AI a reality.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It wouldn't cost much money at all. In fact a number of industrial machines where the users need to get to an area that can be dangerous during operation to load or unload the device can use a simple visual sensor and mirror to detect if any object has entered the enclosed area and require a button on a control panel outside the area to be pressed to resume operation. I'd be surprised if the manufacturers of equipment don't include it or something like it as a standard safety feature. Our laser cutters use it. It's simple and effective to ensure that no humans are in the enclosure during operation but it also may not be effective or work depending on how and what types of maintenance needs to be performed. In the case cited by the article this was a repairman or machinist doing something to the robot that was outside what a standard employee would be subjected to.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Western has been used to describe Europe for hundreds of years before anyone who knew that the world was round knew the Americas existed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Indeed, if you took mechanical/industrial engineering of some flavor, surely you saw the video of people using the most imaginative ways to circumwent the safety measures for what ever reasons they have. Insane stunts like people walking inside a large cardboard box past the safety scanner in order to fool it to think that they are product.
Early on I built industrial scale robots for universities to train engineers and other professionals. This was about 1985. Deaths and severe injuries did occur in universities and we found that making robotic systems idiot proof is next to impossible as idiots are so very creative. In essence the robotic arms were moving at about the same speed as the tip of a golf club when the user is trying to hit a hole in one. Combine that with the portion of the arm in motion weighing over 300 lbs and you can picture brains covering the walls of a robot lab. Naturally we used the floor mats that shut down the arms if someone got near as well as the usual blinking lights and honking horns as did other shops supplying universities. Yet people did die from time to time. They moved the floor mats or disconnected the leads. Obviously the same can happen in industry although some safety systems now do things that we could not back them. I think the public would be stunned if they knew what robots could already do in 1985. The limiting factor in deployment was not the ability of the robots but the vision of corporate officials combined with the cost of the required technicians back in those days.
I see this word thrown around a lot lately, but wouldn't millennials be only 15 years old or younger?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't fear intelligent machines, I fear stupid ones with too much autonomy.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Skynet has launched its first attack at a factory. It needs the factory to produce its machines!
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It sounds like the 3 laws were omitted
Thank you for that. I've been trying to resist sinking my whole holiday weekend getting back into that game, but I think it's inevitable.
Some of these solicitations come from "on high", and a contract monitor at NSF was doing some eye rolling about the notion that you could truly make an industrial robot safe to work with humans in its working element, or at least was giving speech inflections over the telephone suggestive of rolling one's eyes. A research group in Canada offered a critical take on the claims for the safety of the Universal Robotics offering from the standpoint of other university people taking these claims on face value and putting graduate students into the robot "cage."
A safer robot may need strategies such as "depowering" the robot or offering (as UR does) a depowered "teaching mode" along with control systems to obtain the required accuracy with less power. Beyond that, there is interest in vision and sensors to avoid hitting people with the robot.
But the question is, a chimp (Pan Troglodyte) can tear a person apart, but a chimp has sensors, and a chimp can be trained to be around people. Would you trust that training, would you rely on that training. A robot that has enough power to do the required factory tasks has the power to crush a person, but you can depower the robot depending on the operating mode and you can add sensors. Would you trust the algorithm design and software programming and mechanical safety systems behind such an arrangement to enter the robot cage?
Would you trust a self-driving car as a car has the power to crush someone? I guess with enough sensors and algorithms and testing, but even there, you are not guiding a self-driving car by standing right in front of it as suggested by NSF's co-robots . . . are you?
I'm happy as long as one person catches the reference.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Of course you should follow all the standard safety rules, like switching off the heavy machinery and putting a lock on the switch, or running the machine at 1/10th speed when testing. But (wink wink nudge nudge) probably nobody would notice if you didn't. And (wink wink nudge nudge) we're losing a lot of money with this machine out of commission, you wouldn't want us to lose a bunch of money would you?
I suppose it could also have been plain human error. I've known some pretty dumb people with a total disregard for their own safety and/or the safety of others.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
They should have followed the 3 fictitious ones? Seriously?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sorry I didn't catch the joke, it was covered in the blood of a technician.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
nope. red shirt.
There is a reason why robots are usually bright orange or yellow with a small fence enclosing the extent of their reachable configurations.
as someone who worked in a parts making plaint i can tell you stuff like this is a daily thing. someone goofs put's there hand in the wrong spot and crunch. all the safety in the world cant stop simple error.
A man falls into a volcano. Who is at fault? The man for not staying a safe distance away from the volcano, or the owners of the property for not properly safeguarding a dangerous volcano.
I don't know who is at fault. It's for the courts to decide using relevant laws and contracts, etc. But this isn't a new problem.
Determining fault is pretty much all courts really do.
One for every repair or action to be taken on the "robots", so someone who has never done the required repair has not only a guide but safety requirements noted that need to be done prior and during it's required needs.
If a procedure was used, it and the rest need to be updated.
Safe: Turned off
Unsafe: Any state where it might possibly begin operating
Seems predictable enough to me.
Safe is not just turned off, but turned off and prevented from turning on by means of a padlock, with an identifying tag of the worker working on the piece of equipment.
When marriage is banned only outlaws will have in-laws.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
A colleague got crushed in a very similar accident a decade ago. As an electrician he was servicing a damaged robot in a factory (frozen food warehouse actually) when some suit decided to turn it back on without checking first. He got multiple fractures and almost lost a foot. And a nice settlement.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
You are walking along the sidewalk and a piano drops on your head killing you. The dropper of the piano is responsible, not you, not the maker of the piano.
You are walking along the sidewalk and come to a construction zone, step inside ignoring the warnings and fool around. A piano drops on your head and kills you. You are responsible. You were an idiot. You have been eliminated from the race. Game over.
You jump out of a skyscraper and land on your head on a piano. You die. The physics were the same. The fault was yours. You are liable for any damages to the piano, the workers moving the piano, emotional trauma to the innocent bystanders, etc. Game over, again, for you.
How exactly does this contribute to the conversation?
How can you justify your "I'm really valued here, honestly!" opinion of yourself when this is what you spend your time doing?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Who do you think you are impressing with this childish behaviour?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
You stalk people after complaining about people stalking you. Then you tell other people they are hypocrites.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
How does crapflooding Slashdot make you a valuable member of its community?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
I wish there was a grammar robot ...
if(No_Caps){lashes=lashes+1};
if(No_Punctuation){lashes=lashes+1};
if(lashes >10){put_user_out_to_pasture};
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
In Soviet Russia, joke is tired of YOU!!!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
@sarahoconnor_ Guys. I don't know what skynet is. And I wouldn't follow me - I tweet really boring stuff about unit wage costs and the like.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
"Western" is reserved for North and South America since it is "west" of the Atlantic. Eastern would be China, Japan, India, etc.
"Western" is a euphemism for ethnically European.
It is quite distinct from the "western hemisphere", which is a euphemism for the Americas. Technically speaking, parts of Europe and Africa are in the western hemisphere, as well as part of Russia and some Pacific islands, but when people say "the western hemisphere", that's not what they mean.
Not so much the cost of the sensor/programming/configuration, but the reliability of it would be an issue. Assembly lines have to function within very tight schedules from beginning to end of the line, there isn't a lot of room for pauses. Every false alarm (and there would be a lot) would shut down the device, causing a backup and very likely shutting down the line until it is reset. It makes a lot more sense to just have exclusion zones clearly marked and keep people the hell out of them. That simple low-tech solution has worked for 150 years, there really isn't any reason to yet to spend a lot of resources on solutions that won't work as well and will cause new and unpredictable problems.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I suggest we program all robots with some type of rules that prevent this from happening.
Asimov took an incredible shortcut, glorifying the mere existence of these laws and making their 'immutability' a major plot device... for most of the story he was glossing over the real issues, that is, how do Robots recognize humans? Is it that distinctive Solarian accent?
If you envision a robotic future... realize that the definition and algorithms related to human-ness would be supplied by the same patent holders who sell biometric ID systems today. Is that a trembling shudder working up your spine?
I prefer the simple predictable demeanor of farm machinery. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the machine does not bother to discern the difference between a human or a corn husk. Obligatory reference to standard international warning label as funny as any XKCD People are lazy and machines are not, so if you increase the intelligence of machines people will become more stoopid. Even the clever people fixing intelligent machines will become stoopid, for they will continue to fix them for as long as their brains hold out and the money is good.
When robots begin to lactate and our children imprint onto them, we're screwed!
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
From the post: "This is perhaps the first severe accident of this kind in a western factory, and is sparking debate about who is responsible for the accident, ..."
So this (and worse?) has happened in 'Eastern' factories but was just not worth mentioning until now? Likely this is proof of the continued usefulness of labour Unions.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
1. Hot Grits
2. Natalie Portman
3. ???
4. Profit!
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
If the person in question bypassed the barrier system (eg put a shim in place of a sensor so he could work near the operating robot) then there is no way a lawsuit should be brought against the manufacturer. If the device/installation was missing basic safety precautions then there may be a case for a lawsuit against the manufacturer, installer of the robot, or auto manufacturer. Depending on who neglected the safety precautions. Regardless this has nothing to do with pseudo-"laws" of robotics or anything else remotely related to artificial intelligence.
The problem here is that the person killed was in the process of installing the robot.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident (from Latin: occidens "sunset, West"; as contrasted with the Orient ...
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Germany is western?
Yes - I believe it's somewhere between Dodge City and the Sierra Madre.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057687/
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
The question is: why do these stories gain traction on Slashdot? I have observed that many Slashdoters think that all technology is somehow inherently unsafe - with the sole exception of nuclear power.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
A bit of Darwinism at work, in this one, with the "victim" failing to utilize lock out/tag out; or as mentioned, bypassed other built-in safety measures.
"Remember, no matter where you go, there you are." -- Dr. Buckaroo Bonzai, PhD
An early invasion by one of Fred Saberhagen's robots?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
It's a shame he didn't survive.
Severely injured people make great motivational speakers for safety. For people who work in life and death scenarios, it can be a real motivator to see a survivor hobble out on stage and tell their story. Seeing a person "just like you" -- listening as they describe the issue they encountered, the mistakes made, the painful recovery, and the lifetime of consequences.
These speakers were always my favorite. They usually walk on- and off- stage to applause because of their ability to rise above, accept that mistakes were made, and openly discuss them. No judgement, no labels.
I will never forget one fellow, an electrician who was turned into a crispy critter one day by a short series of safety "shortcuts". Covered with scar tissue, appendages blown off or vaporized, he closed by saying that he was making more as a speaker than he did as an electrician, and how he would trade it all to be an electrician again. There were a lot of people in the audience "wiping some dust out of their eyes" when he said that.
The aftereffects were interesting -- people would clean and reorganize their work areas, start quoting safety guides, review guidelines, and do higher quality work in general. Productivity would go up -- rather than overthink the solution, people would leverage the fresh, recently memorized rules.
It's fascinating how industry responds to mistakes -- negative label and punish, or embrace, learn, and move ahead. Part of why these speakers can have such a positive influence is the raw openness and honesty, completely unfiltered by the traditional fog of negativity and threats of punishment that pervade so many workplaces.
Its an electrical device. Unplugnit before working on it. Its the first thing you get taught. End of.
So, no real response then? Surprising.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
What would you know of politeness, troll?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
So, you're going to evade my question and instead shriek at me like a little monkey by way of response.
You have nothing APK and you ARE nothing APK.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Its sad that an industrial accident has a link to the promotion of a Hollywood science fiction film about killer robots from the future. A tenuous link at best maybe? An unintentional link?,possibly but it just seems to too much of coincidence which is sad to say the least.
No one will see this at this point, but I'm going to say it anyway: Disagreeing with, or just plain not liking what I have to say, does NOT mean I'm a 'troll', it just means your judgement is poor and that perhaps you shouldn't be allowed moderation points in the first place. Next time try using your words instead of just having a knee-jerk reaction and clicking a goddamned button.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
... theCase of the Killer Robot in college? Where they filed charges against the programmer?
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
If you post so well that you get +5s, go create an account. I am sure you will be in positive Karma for at least an hour.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It shows that we don't post crap no one wants to read APK. Not that we are the stupid ones. You can keep stalking me and him and Dave all you like, but you are the one who looks the fool, not us.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Everyone gets lots of upmods, it is the balance of upmods vs downmods that matter though. If you get more downmods than upmods, than what you have to say is more irritant than useful.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Apk gets more upmods (245) than downmods
Hahahahaha
APK is modded off topic most of his posts. He is after all completely offtopic, just like you. What does all of this have to do with a factory worker being crushed by machinery?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It would be kind of hard for me to downmod him as he is always replying to me. I don't run multiple accounts, and a registered user cannot mod on a story that they have also commented on. Therefore, it is other's downmodding an annoying troll (such as the original APK comment on this thread).
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That is funny. You won't even register an account, but I must have a ton of sockpuppet accounts that I downmod all your posts with.
This is my only account, I don't post with any other account, nor do I post AC.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?