Author & Editor|Sun Haonan
Exhaustion is the norm for many office workers, and people will feel this way when they do physical and mental work for a long time but cannot be relieved, but they didn't expect robots to be like this, and even radical enough to get rid of work in a "suicidal" way.
Ordinary people can quit their jobs when they are tired from work, but robots cannot, they have to take on a lot of manual labor without rest, and even the so-called Korean executive robot is just a work machine with a nice name. Could it be that these robots who choose to "commit suicide" and resign have developed a sense of autonomy in the increasingly tiring work?
Overworked, South Korean administrative robot jumped off the building and resigned
Recently, the Gumi City Hall in North Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, announced that their first executive robot failed after falling down the stairs, and local media called it "the country's first robot suicide" and mourned.
According to AFP, witnesses saw the robot "spinning around somewhere, as if something was there" before the accident, but the exact cause of the fall is still under investigation.
Gumi City Hall officials said the robot was serving administrative documents at the time of the incident. At around 4 p.m. that day, it fell down the second-floor stairs and was subsequently found unresponsive. An official said: "We monitored the status of the robot in real time and managed it remotely, but it suddenly rushed down the stairs. The company associated with the bot has collected the fragments and will analyze them. ”
Technology Vortex has learned that the city of Gumi will put the robot into use in August 2023 and is the first government unit in the city to replace people with robots to perform daily work. The robot is the latest model developed by Bear Robotics, a California-based Silicon Valley start-up, but the finished product is produced by Intops, a domestic electronics manufacturer. Intops' manufacturing plant is located in Gumi City.
The robot works from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and has its own civil service card just like a general civil servant. What makes it special is that it can call the elevator and go up and down the stairs on its own, unlike ordinary robots, which can usually only work on a single floor.
According to reports, the robot helps with daily document delivery, urban promotion, and the delivery of information to local residents. "It officially became part of the town hall and was one of us," said another city council official, "and it worked very hard." ”
Of course, the robot work set by the program is diligent, but it may be the first time to go to work, and I can't even hold on to it for a year and "can't stand it" and resign suicidally. Some media believe that the reason why the robot "committed suicide" was because the work was too hard, although this view is strange but not unreasonable, after all, there have been similar incidents long before this.
The U.S. security robot committed suicide by throwing himself into the water
As early as 2017, the New York Times reported that a security robot who had just taken up his post at the Washington Harbour complex last week fell into a pool while on patrol.
People affectionately call this security robot "Steve". It is the K5 autonomous robot that startup Knightscope has spent nearly a year building. It is about 1.5 meters high, 0.914 meters long, 0.813 meters wide, weighs 136 kilograms, and is equipped with surveillance cameras, sensors, odor detectors, thermal imaging systems and scanners. Stephen is mainly responsible for patrolling the Washington Harbor Mall, detecting suspicious behavior and alerting the operator, which is said to be expected to reduce the crime rate by 50 percent.
Although this robot is very powerful from the introduction, it is precisely because of this that netizens will think that its accidental overboard behavior is because the work pressure of security patrol is too great, so they will take the initiative to resign.
In the end, there is no plausible explanation for the investigation, and Knightscope, the maker of the robot Stephen, is doing its best to do public relations to mitigate the negative impact of the incident. KnightScope's president said in an emailed statement that the company is investigating the incident and will send a new robot to Washington Harbor Mall within the week.
Consciousness awakening or technical glitch?
In fact, judging from the details of these two robot "suicide" incidents, this is not because the robot consciousness awakened and does not want to be a suicide resignation, as netizens said, but because of the unexpected failure of the technology is immature.
Because if you really have self-consciousness and want to "commit suicide", then the human mind is to find a tall building, but the Korean robot just fell from the second floor, which is more like the feeling of a person falling down. As for the security robots in the United States, it is even less likely to awaken to consciousness, after all, it was only 2017 and the technology did not reach the required level at all. And this is not the first time the K5 robot has made a mistake, as a 16-month-old boy was injured in a previous K5 malfunction.
So it's more likely that the two robots were caused by technical glitches, design flaws, programming errors, or unexpected circumstances in the interaction of the environment. For example, a robot may have fallen due to a navigation error, a mechanical failure, a sensor malfunction, or more. The "falling after spinning in place" mentioned in media reports may be one of the manifestations of the malfunction.
Technology Vortex also briefly described the incident to some well-known AIs on the market for questioning, and the views obtained are basically the same, after all, even the most advanced Chat GPT is far from reaching the situation of generating autonomous consciousness, how can a robot that is only used to assist in work.
Write at the end
This incident is not just a report of a technical failure, it is more like a mirror, reflecting the complex mentality of human society in the face of daily fatigue. Netizens called it a suicidal resignation, but they were just making fun of their boring and tired life, which reflected a series of practical problems that need to be solved urgently, such as high work pressure, holiday compensation, and overtime.
The development of robots is more complex than that of AI large model technology, because mechanical manufacturing, material science and other issues are important factors that limit the speed of its development. Perhaps, one day in the future, artificial intelligence may be upgraded to "machine intelligence", and robots may be as emotional and conscious as we are and strive for an eight-hour workday.