BY SPACE · NOVEMBER 18, 2016
At the technological China Hi-Tech Fair exhibition in the Chinese city of Shenzhen there was an attack of the robot first in the history on the person. The android of “The little fat man” who was created to help children with study got out of hand and began to destroy everything. One person suffered.
Incident occurred when “Fat man” for a while remained off-hand with the stand of the developer. The robot began to force down protections, and then ran to one of workers of an exhibition into a leg. The trauma turned out so serious that the man had to be hospitalized.
The android of Little Chubby is positioned by the producer as the educational robot for children from 4 to 12 years. Its cost makes about 1,4 thousand dollars.
It is interesting that the Japanese Pepper robot makes the considerable progress in adaptation to human society. In the spring the android was admitted to school, and also settled the waiter in a pizzeria.
(earth-chronicles.com)
Although it’s hard to tell from this account just what happened or what injury the person sustained, whatever injury it was is enough to count as one more person injured by a robot. This person is certainly not the first one–with all the industrial robots in the world there have probably been many injuries and deaths. And there’s been at least one death connected to a robot controlled car–it’s really misleading to call them “driverless” as if they were careening around out of control.
“Robot wars” is another questionable term as I would argue that robots are not going to be any more capable of conducting war than any other machine for the far foreseeable future. I know it’s fashionable to attribute all kinds of essentially magical powers to these machines, but I call a machine a machine, and I say it’s JUST a machine.
But poorly constructed or poorly programmed machines of *any* kind are a danger. Consider: elevators, today’s passenger cars, fighter jets, drones, x-ray machines, CAT scans, etc., etc. In each kind of machine I just mentioned there have been poorly made/programmed units and people have been injured or died. Thousands of people. This is what we should be paying attention to, not the “robot wars.”
Even now at the end of the Obama administration the political climate is such that manufacturers are not going to get the kind of regulatory oversight to prevent more people from injury and death, or even rules that make such injuries and deaths a matter of public record–the specifications of the machines, documentation on how they were designed and programmed. With Trump as president, who knows? It may get worse before it gets better.
However, this is a very complicated issue–I’m not sure there’s much consensus on just what regulatory measures would really be best in many cases, although there may be in some. Consider a current problem that has surfaced in public view: if you were to buy a computer controlled car, in the case of an emergency run-away situation, would you want it to be programmed to take action so as to avoid injury to you the passenger even though it may injure pedestrians or bystanders, OR, programmed to take action that would avoid hitting any pedestrians even though the passenger might be injured?