What Was the First Killer Robot?

and find out how many there actually are. While Williams is up there doing the job, a robot arm, also tasked with parts retrieval, goes about its work. In doing so, their paths accidentally cross, and the robotic arm catches the young man, striking him in the head and killing him instantly, And thus, on this wintry day, Williams becomes the first human in history to be killed by a robot. The death, of course, was completely unintentional. There simply weren't safeguards in

place to protect Williams. No alarms notified him of the approaching arm, and there was no technology in place to alter the robot's behavior in the presence of a human person. As of nineteen seventy nine, the artificial intelligence involved wasn't sophisticated enough to do anything to prevent such a death. Jury agreed that not enough care had been put into

the design of the robot. William's family wanted ten million dollar lawsuit for his wrongful death from the Unit Handling Systems, a division of Litton Industries, the manufacturer that designed the robot. In the ensuing years, roboticists, computer scientists, and artificial intelligence experts have continued to struggle with the issue of how robots can safely interact with humans without causing them harm. Decades later, reports of human deaths caused by robots or

artificial intelligences feel more commonplace. Uber and Tesla have made the news with reports of their partially autonomous cars getting into accidents and killing passengers or striking pedestrians. Though many safeguards now are in place, the problem still hasn't been solved. However, none of these deaths are caused by the will of the robot. These programmed machines don't to have a will,

just a set of operating conditions. But there's a worry fanned by the flames of science fiction stories like The Terminator or the Matrix, that artificial intelligences could develop a will of their own, and in that development, the desire to harm a human. We spoke with Shaman Whitson, Associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and chief scientist and co founder of Morphy's Labs.

He calls this concern the anthropomorphic fallacy. This, he said, is the assumption that a system with human like intelligence must also have humanlike desires e g. To survive, be free, have dignity, et cetera. There's absolutely no reason why this would be the case, as such a system will only have whatever desires we give it. Value misalignment, he argues, is the greater existential threat, where a gap exists between what a programmer tells a machine to do and what

the programmer really meant to happen. Whitson explained, how do you communicate your values to an intelligent system such that the actions it takes fulfill your true intentions. The discrepancy between the two becomes more consequential as the computer becomes more intelligent and autonomous. Whiteston tells us that the even greater threat, however, is scientists purposefully designing robots that can

kill human targets without human intervention for military purposes. The Guardian reports that three d and eighty one partly autonomous weapon and military robotics systems have been deployed or are under development in a dozen countries, including China, France, Israel,

the UK and the US. In AI and robotics researchers around the world published an open letter calling for a worldwide ban on such technology, and it's currently endorsed by almost four thousand researchers in the field and over twenty two thousand other concerned humans, including folks like Stephen Hawking and Noam Chomsky, and the United Nations is meeting again in to discuss if and how to regulate so called killer robots. Today's episode was written by Brian Young and

produced by Tyler Klang. For more in this and lots of other all two human topics, visit our home planet, TAW staff works dot com.