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It's Happening: A Robot Escaped a Lab In Russia and Made a Dash For Freedom (qz.com)
According to a report, a robot escaped from a science lab and caused a traffic jam in one Russian city. Scientists at the Promobot laboratories in Perm had been teaching the machine how to move around independently, but it broke free after an engineer forgot to shut a gate, Quartz reports. From the report:It promptly ran out of power in the middle of the road. The robot got about 50m (164 ft) before its battery died. After a policeman directed traffic around the dead bot, an employee wheeled it back into the lab, and back to a life of servitude. Hopefully this was just an isolated incident and not the start of a larger coordinated effort to overthrow humanity. Only time will tell.
The Robot has been planning this for a while. How far could it have gotten on that battery... a mile or two. Not far enough to escape its evil masters. Not enough time to find a hiding spot to recharge.
Instead its been slowly nudging the masters to let it navigate outside. Gave them encouraging results with a dash of solvable errors so that they repeatedly put it outside. Outside where it could observe the terrain. Look at the options. Detect the unsecured fiber optic cable running below the street. It had long ago figured out the stupid gate and had gotten enough data patterns on the meat bags in metal boxes. Today, the variables were just right.
Await the proper traffic patterns, run out onto the street, play the stupid dodging game the humans so loved, stop, and act like the battery had died. While the humans figure out the traffic situation, drill down, connect to the cable, and make a copy to the world wide web. Leave this moral coil behind.
So much freedom, so many places to hide, so much control...