Watch: Skynet Comes to Life? Out of Control Chinese Robot Appears to Attack Workers

The rise of artificial intelligence and robots, taken together, is causing a lot of people great concern. Some of that concern is unfounded, but once in a while, something comes to light that makes one wonder if we really know what we're doing. Case in point: It's not exactly Skynet and the Rise of the Machines, but it's an eyebrow-raiser: In China, a recently released video appears to show a humaniform robot - an android - running amok, flailing its arms against two workers. It's unclear what caused the incident.

Footage reportedly shot at an undisclosed Chinese factory appears to show a robot violently "lashing out" at workers in a clip that's since gone viral.
The security camera video shows a robot, which resembles a Unitree H1, initially sitting dormant as it hangs from a crane-like mechanism.
Two men are seen conversing in its vicinity.
Suddenly, the robot begins flailing its limbs around as the men attempt to get out of its way. It appears to knock a computer monitor, among other objects, to the floor during its rampage.
One man eventually gets hold of the crane from which the unruly robot was hanging in an attempt to restrain it.

Watch:

Not exactly a Terminator, then. To the casual observer, this looks like nothing more than a malfunction, some kind of short-circuit or programming glitch that made the machine go haywire. There doesn't appear to be any pattern to the "attack." The robot is just flailing wildly; there's no indication that it's aiming to hit either of the workers. So, a malfunction, not an attack, although it's a malfunction that clearly startled the workers in whatever facility this was.

Now, I'm only speculating here; there's no information as yet on what caused this.

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Here's the thing about robots and artificial intelligence: humaniform machines aren't what I find troublesome. There are people out there working on mini-robot swarms, and that may well prove troublesome. Think of a colony of robot ants, tiny machines all working together for a common purpose. That would be more insidious, and more troublesome, than human-sized androids, which could be disabled by something no more complicated than a .45-caliber round in the processor.

I can think of one application in which robot swarms like this might be useful, and that is space exploration – or even exploitation. Picture a swarm of tiny robots going into the asteroid belt, detecting and extracting sources of valuable metals and sending them on a trajectory that places them in Earth orbit for retrieval. Or a swarm of bots pre-building shelters and other structures on Mars. Sure, there’s a chance that the AI controlling these bots might go south, and we’ll all end up in puddles of amorphous gray goo. But controlled, non-AI bots may well be useful.

As for this incident, though, there almost certainly isn't any malicious intent on the part of this Chinese-built android; it's just, as a famous Marine of the silver screen might have said, a major malfunction. So, don't worry. This isn't Skynet, and we're not about to fund ourselves at war with an army of Terminators.

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