Robots With Guns: Potentially Dangerous Since 1932
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 16 of August , 2010 at 2:08 am
When we wrote about Alpha the robot back in March, we mentioned that it wasn’t exactly the safest machine to be around:
“Once it fired its pistol without warning, blasting the skin off [its creator's] arm from wrist to elbow. Another time it lowered its arm unexpectedly, struck an assistant on the shoulder, bruised him so badly that he was hospitalized.”
Anyway, the article in the picture above (from 1932) is a contemporary account of the incident, and although it seems as though the author probably embraced his creative license a bit more than a newspaper reporter perhaps should have, it’s an interesting peek into how people reacted to some of the very first humanoid robots. You can read the whole article in PDF format here.
On a side note (which is inevitably going to become the focus of this post, so here we go), it’s sort of amazing how similar that headline is to the type of things we read and hear when robots (for whatever reason) cause injuries to humans in the present. Irrespective of what actually happened, the robot is always given some kind of malicious motive, which obviously it doesn’t possess… Because of how they’re constructed, robots are always (always) doing what you tell them to do. If they screw something up, it’s because you (or some other human) screwed it up first, either in terms of the hardware or the software.
Also, I would just like to point out that this story, rather than illustrating the potential dangers of armed robots, should actually serve as an example of why a robot with a gun isn’t necessarily any more or any less dangerous than a human with a gun. I mean, this is gun safety 101: if someone (or something) has a loaded weapon, you don’t stand in front of it. Yes, robots can occasionally be unpredictable. So can humans. The difference is, when a robot shoots you when you didn’t intend it to, you can rip it apart, figure out what happened, and fix it so that it (or that particular issue, anyway) doesn’t happen again.
[ Jess Nevins ] VIA [ io9 ]
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