The dreadful demise of the suicidal robot
A ROBOT has been making the news in the United States over the last week.
And with good reason. When a Washington DC department store hired a robot as its new security guard on the grounds that it was “never bored, always awake and constantly vigilant”, the constantly-wakeful and ever-vigilant robot inexplicably committed suicide.
It drove itself into a pond where it drowned.
Why it did so was the mystery that its now-frantic inventors are trying to unravel.
At first, suspicion centred on the firm’s head of sales whose perfume was, well, admittedly industrial-strength to say the least.
“We’re not saying your perfume is too strong,” the apologetic investigators reassured the tearful woman. “All we’re saying is that the parrot had been alive until you got here.”
But it was not the pungent perfume that had driven the robot to its demise. It simply could not have been.
Suspicion then fell on the store’s resident vacuum cleaner. Looked at from a certain perspective, you could see why a certain kind of ever-vigilant robot might get attracted to a vacuum cleaner. Why do you think it’s been said that Nature abhors a vacuum?
Now imagine if you will. That poor, importunate robocop ardently professing his love for said vacuum cleaner only to be defeated by its cold, relentless silences. Day in, day out.
It would have been enough to drive a man to drink. But the suitor had not been programmed to imbibe, which was a pity. Suicide would have been a logical, and perhaps, fitting end.
Its inventors ruled that out as well. Although they contemplated giving the implacable vacuum cleaner the third-degree, they regretfully ruled out unrequited love as a cause.
It was like this. Although the robot could emit noises, could sense body heat and do a great many things including a nifty ham omelette, it had no olfactory senses whatsoever. Neither did it have feelings.
In short, it could not smell nor feel which meant that both the perfume, and said head of sales, and the unfeeling vacuum cleaner were innocent.
There had been no apparent reason for its mindless suicide although it was conceded that it had no mind in the first place. In addition, its job had been secure: no one else wanted it.
Suicidal robots had never been part of the grand plan of the firm that invented these robocops. Instead it had been touted as the way of the future.
When the robot worked, according to its inventors, it was able to understand its own environment and judge whether something was wrong, using a combination of microphones, video cameras and other sensors. In the future, it was expected to get other features like gun detection and artificial intelligence.
If it detected that something was wrong, said robocop could squeak, whistle and make other loud noises intended to dissuade criminals and others from causing a nuisance.
Looking like something out of Star Wars, the robot cost only US$7 per hour to rent out, and had extra skills including the ability to withstand attack and not to get bored, freeing people from having to carry out dull patrols.
But robots had never been programmed to kill themselves. The thought was chilling because it seemed to indicate that said suicide had a mind of its own and preferred to end this life of being never bored, always vigilant and forever sleepless.
Maybe, just maybe, its inventors had accidentally created artificial intelligence. The thought excited its chief inventor so much that he had a massive heart attack and was rushed to the nearest hospital.
Although he was much beloved, he died because his fellow inventors had forgotten his blood type. But they took comfort in his last words which he repeated a number of times.
“Be positive.”