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Scientists Truly Want Robots to Kill Us All


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They’re not even pretending any more. For example, a bunch of human race-hating scientists in Slovenia have just gone up and made a robot specifically designed to punch humans. From New Scientist:

ISAAC ASIMOV would probably have been horrified at the
experiments under way in a robotics lab in Slovenia. There, a powerful
robot has been hitting people over and over again in a bid to induce
anything from mild to unbearable pain – in apparent defiance of the late
sci-fi sage’s famed first law of robotics, which states that “a robot
may not injure a human being”.

But the robo-battering is all in a good cause, insists Borut Pov?e,
who has ethical approval for the work from the University of Ljubljana,
where he conducted the research. He has persuaded six male colleagues
to let a powerful industrial robot repeatedly strike them on the arm, to
assess human-robot pain thresholds.

It’s not because he thinks the first
law of robotics is too constraining to be of any practical use, but
rather to help future robots adhere to the rule. “Even robots designed
to Asimov’s laws can collide with people. We are trying to make sure
that when they do, the collision is not too powerful,” Pov?e says. “We
are taking the first steps to defining the limits of the speed and
acceleration of robots, and the ideal size and shape of the tools they
use, so they can safely interact with humans.” …

The team will continue their tests
using an artificial human arm to model the physical effects of far more
severe collisions. Ultimately, the idea is to cap the speed a robot
should move at when it senses a nearby human, to avoid hurting them.
Pov?e presented his work at the IEEE’s Systems, Man and Cybernetics conference in Istanbul, Turkey, this week.

Dude. You want to keep robots from colliding with humans? Put a fucking sensor on them that tells them when something is close so they don’t run into it. It’s not hard; we have them on fucking cars now so people don’t back up onto children. All you’re doing is making a robot designed to inflict pain on humans. I love forward to these assholes’ next experiment, which is to teach a robot not to murder humans by building a robot that does nothing but murder humans all day. Thanks to Church for the tip.