A robot that could not handle the pressure of working 9 hours a day committed suicide

When the manager pressures us with work requests, we say to ourselves: “Am I a robot?”, as if only robots can handle the pressure, but it seems that even robots cannot always handle the pressure.

The media reported that a robot in South Korea committed suicide by falling from a height, causing it to stop working, which raised astonishment and questions.

The Gumi City Council in South Korea announced that a robot it was working with was found unresponsive and unresponsive after it apparently fell down a two-metre flight of stairs.

Eyewitnesses saw the officer robot “circling in one place as if something had happened” before the accident occurred, but the exact cause of the fall is still under investigation, a city council official told the English version of France 24.

“The pieces have been collected and will be analyzed by the company,” one official said, adding that the robot “was helping deliver daily documents, promoting the city, and providing information” to local residents.

Another official said: “He was officially part of City Hall. He was one of us, and he worked hard.”

But local newspapers raised questions about the robot's apparent suicide, saying: "Why did the hardworking civilian officer do that?" Or wondering “was it too hard to work” on the robot?

While the Gumi City Council spoke out that it does not currently plan to operate a second officer robot in its place again.

The robot could not handle the pressure of work!

The robot is set to be released in August 2023, and was one of the first robots to be used in this way in the South Korean city.

The robot worked from 9am to 6pm and had its own civil service officer card.

Unlike other robots that can usually only use one floor, the Gumi City Council robot could call the elevator and navigate between floors on its own.

The robot was made by Bear Robotics , a startup company in California that specializes in manufacturing assistive robots at work, as indicated by the British newspaper Daily Mail .

South Korea is considered one of the countries most enthusiastic about the use of robots globally.

It has the highest density of robots in the world, with one industrial robot for every 10 employees, according to the International Federation of Robotics .

Can robots commit suicide?

Of course, this question came to your mind. Since the robot was designed and built specifically to carry out certain tasks after it was programmed to do them, how can it carry out another task (suicide) because, for example, it is bored with the task for which it was programmed? How can a robot feel and make emotional decisions like this?

We tried to search for the answer, and we found the explanations that raised this topic talking about one thing, “artificial intelligence.”

Against the backdrop of another “robot suicide” in Austria in 2013 whose mission was to clean homes, The Economic Times said that this incident is “the first concrete evidence” of what artificial intelligence can achieve.

The newspaper reported that developing artificial intelligence devices capable of not only performing certain tasks, but also feeding on human feelings and information, may “lead to reaching another level.”

Another suicide robot, another revelation

But this incident still leaves a possibility other than suicide. In the year 2017, newspapers widely circulated news about the suicide of a security robot called Steve, or K5., by dropping himself into a fountain in Washington, D.C., but after investigation and retrieving data from the robot's black box, it turned out that it was not suicide, but rather an accident.

The robot made by Knightscope was on a mission to map the floor of the complex, and it turned out that it slipped on a “loose brick surface.” A technical error occurred because its algorithm did not detect that the surface was uneven when it slid down some stairs, which led to the robot Steve falling into the fountain and drowning. .

The K5 robot had a 360-degree video camera, several microphones, air quality sensors, and had thermal imaging capabilities.

The robot could scan up to 1,500 number plates per second, while microphones could detect gunfire, according to Ars Technica and the British newspaper The Independent .

(Arabi Post + Agencies)