Some social media accounts are claiming that a robot killed itself at a trade-show demonstration rather than continue the monotonous task of moving bins onto a conveyor belt. This is false. The company that created the robot says it is a machine programmed to perform tasks, noting it occasionally fails and needs a repair.
A TikTok account posted a from the ProMat trade show in Chicago in March in which a robot known as Digit moves several bins from a shelf onto a nearby conveyor belt before suddenly collapsing in a heap.
The video had a caption saying, "Robot shuts down, commits su*c*de, after algorithm decides it didn't like doing the same manual labor over and over again." In-video text said, "The Al experienced 15 minutes of wage slavery then immediately kil d itself after determining it as the logical choice."
The suggestion, whether serious or tongue-in-cheek, is that artificial intelligence and machine-learning know-how has evolved to the point where robots such as Digit can think, feel and act with intent.
Rating: False
The TikTok video prompted several sardonic comments such as, "Can you still come in to work tomorrow?” and "Tell him can wear jeans to work on Friday. He will be fine." Another commenter took a comically philosophical tack: "Seems like design flaw to give a packing robot AI that understands existential nihilism, but go off I guess."
At the Chicago event, Digit did more than 20 hours of demonstrations over four days with a 99 per cent success rate, said Liz Clinkenbeard, vice-president of communications at Agility Robotics.
That included another two days of full demonstrations after the fall shown in the video, which happened about halfway through the second day, she said. "Coming on the heels of a very successful public demonstration of Digit, we wanted to show that Digit did fall a couple of times, that it's a normal part of any new technology, and it's not a big deal."
When this Alpha prototype robot does fall, it's usually due to a software bug or a minor sensor error, Clinkenbeard said. Sometimes a minor repair is required.
The company's robots use various tools that are sometimes referred to as artificial intelligence, such as machine learning, along with many other algorithmic tools to generate behaviours, she added.
"We do want to be careful about not over-humanizing a machine or ascribing intent. While Digit looks something like a person, in reality it is a computer that can do physical work, and it's following a program. It certainly does not have human intent."
Machines are not sentient beings (at least not yet)
"My take is that seeing the robot fall in the way that it does is similar to seeing a car stall on the highway," said Chris Eliasmith, a University of Waterloo professor with roles in the departments of systems design engineering, philosophy and computer science.
"So it's a machine that's built to do a particular thing. And sometimes machines fail for all kinds of reasons."
Eliasmith noted technological innovations such as the heat-seeking missile that are designed to accomplish a specific goal have existed for many decades. In that sense, they can be said to have intent.
"If we take that kind of definition, which doesn't impute any emotions or consciousness or particular types of mental states, then it's a perfectly reasonable thing to say. But of course, when you use words like 'conscious,' then we are typically expecting some level of sophistication in the behaviour of the system," he said.
"We don't have machines right now that have the level of sophistication of behaviour that we typically find in animals across all of the sensory modalities that we often associate with consciousness. And so we don't think that it would make sense to make claims about machines having conscious states at this point."
Having said that, things are getting more complicated very quickly, Eliasmith added. He said it is not a question of whether, but rather when people will develop machines that possess what people consider consciousness or emotion.
"This might encompass as broadening our notion of an emotion, right? We might say human emotions and machine emotions are different. Just like we might say cat emotions and human emotions are different."
Clinkenbeard said Agility Robotics was not surprised by the popularity of the video, as people always love to see bloopers and falls.
"While we expected to see some jokes and misinformation — it's par for the course with blooper videos — we do want to emphasize that we don't think it's appropriate, ever, to joke about suicide."
Sources
Claim can be found on TikTok (), and on Twitter (, ). The company, Agility Robotics, posted the video ().
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