“@sarahoconnor_ Sigh. I’ve never even watched the films. Now my feed is full of people tweeting me about skynet.”
I sure don’ t trust any “reporter” that has never seen a Terminator movie.
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Before everybody goes off on this it might be worth while to read the “real report” that can be found in the German news sources.
The man was an employee of the company that makes the robots. VW really had nothing whatsoever to do with the accident beyond the fact that it happened in their plant. The victim was supposedly setting up the robot, which might well include creating or adjusting the programming for it. Based on the investigation thus far, there is no sign that the robot “malfunctioned.” Either the programming was incorrect, or maybe incomplete, and.or the worker activated the robot while he wasn’t in a safe place. The German reports include information that he was the only one inside the “safety zone”…the place where no one is supposed to be when the robot is operating.
This sound very dramatic, and I don’t want to minimize the man’s death, but at this point it seems pretty clear that he likely did this to himself, although I doubt he intended to.
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I work with a lot of contractors, and I say “go robots!”
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Robot killed a worker, really! This is the type of story I now expect on yahoo.
If quaint SciFi Golden Age drama had accurately captured post modern banality the stories wouldn’t have sold.
Eventually tech and art will achieve an apotheosis of some sort but humanity might be irrelevant by then…
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Glad the author included the tweets from Sara O’connor, that made the young man’s death totally funny and the article very light-hearted. /s
Whomever is the editor at TPM that let this click bait article through should take a day off, death porn (which is what this article is), isn’t very TPM-like.
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Uh Oh…
Bad robot kills good guy
Where’s the NRA when ya need 'em?
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Someday we, or more likely the robots, will recognize this as the beginning of the new age.
Correct, similar to a person who does not wear a safety harness, etc. Stuff happens like this all the time, but for some reason it’s a headline since a robot was involved.
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The robot broke the First Law of Robotics.
Ut-oh…the rise of the machines!
Que the terminator.
I’ll be back.
Humor?
Perhaps we have a real version of ‘Skynet’ in development in the NSA (National Skynet Agency?)…hmmm!
http://avrlab.com/upload_files/633803506580293050-Skynet.jpg
“you godamned dirty robot…how could you!”
The Singularity is upon us.
Yea I agree, this is not HAL, a robot developing a mind of it’s own and attacking someone. I work at a plant that has one robotic welder but a lot of operator run machines that recently surpassed 1 million hours without a lost time accident. It would be a lot easier for someone in the day to day grind of say running a brake press to smash or cut off their own or someone else’s hand, arm, head or arm than it would for the robot, once programed correctly, to hurt them. I’ve also heard of people doing this on purpose either because they had mental issues, wanted to get workers comp or some combination of both.
I once was setting up a small air press that came with dual palm buttons pre-programed through a PLC. As I was setting it up I pressed only one of the buttons and it operated. Luckily I didn’t have any body parts in the way. I double checked the PLC program and found it’s program had an error that allowed it to operate the press with only one button pushed. I reprogrammed it and it never happened again. Also sent a nasty letter to the company we bought the press from!
So my guess is that in this accident either the robot was programed incorrectly by the guy setting it up or someone else, or the guy misunderstood how the program was set up to run, or he and/or someone he was working with had done something on purpose to defeat the program while setting up the equipment and they didn’t understand the full consequences of their actions. Or he could have done it on purpose as mentioned above.
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From the comments above, this seems like a Darwin thing.
But I guess I could go back to news about the ever burgeoning GOP field or Trump’s pageant problems or [shudder] do some work today.
The safety zone is where no one should be during operation? Sounds a bit counter intuitive.
Most industrial robots are installed with safety devices (light curtains, look-down sensors, dead-man switches on plug-in remotes, physical barriers, etc.) which limit the likelihood that a person would even get a bruise from one of them, much less a fatal injury. It’s part of the CE certification for even selling the product outside of your own national borders. CE certification is required in Europe.
What we’ll probably find out is that at least one, and probably a couple of safety protocols were defeated in this case.
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