(Newswire.net — February 10, 2015) — We knew it was coming. Sci-fi told us it was inevitable. Now we have reports of the first case of a robot attacking its owner. In the ‘attack’ which happened recently in South Korea, a woman called the fire department to her home to rescue her from the grip of her robot.
Kyunghyang Shinmun fell asleep on the floor of her apartment. In the middle of the night, a small led lamp the corner of the room blinked on. Her robotic vacuum cleaner, programmed to clean during the night and return to its station to recharge before dawn, woke up and began its task.
The Robotic vacuum cleaner began its nightly routine of vacuuming the floor. However, the creators of its software, didn’t ‘teach’ the robot to distinguish a human hair attached to the head of a sleeping person from the dust bunnies on the floor.
The robotic vacuum cleaner was on its mission and was aimed right at the head of Shinmun who had fallen asleep on the floor. It is not clear whether it was it more frightening than painful awakening. However, when she realized robot has vacuumed her hair, Shinmun called the firefighters to help her.
Luckily, the fire department arrived before the woman could sustain any injury, and they managed to detach the vacuum from her hair.
Shinmun can also be thankful that the robotic vacuum cleaner isn’t of the hardest sucking or highest-powered model on the market. There are vacuum cleaning robots on the market that could easily scalped her.
The fate of the mutinous robot is unknown.
Though this was not intentional attack – more of a misunderstanding, really – Shinmun has become the first civilian attacked by her robot in modern history.
While this may be a funny story, it was a fully automated vacuum cleaner attack, the first of its kind. It does remind us of the similarities between this and fully automated pilotless military aircraft designed for autonomous flight, and fully autonomous target engagement before returning to base.
In the mid 20th century, the Russian-born Sci-fi novelist Isaac Asimov predicted that human kind will eventually develop a technology that is capable of making a choice, the very thing that make us conscious beings. Warring the machine could make a wrong choice and harm the human, he created a famous three laws of robotics:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law
Unfortunately, those laws stand at odds with our ideas of ‘progress’ which our civilization measures through the wars and development of the technology for the military purposes