Evil robot, rays of death, and monsters that are modified genetically are only a few examples of wrong technologies in science fiction. This is a staple genre and one of the ways that we feel psychologically with our relationship with technology, through entertainment.
However, in real life, technology should make our lives easier. Every new discovery or innovation seems to reduce the amount of work we need to do or make daily activities more comfortable. Flight discovery allows fast international trips anywhere (or most of the) on this planet. The internet allows us to directly share information and communicate with each other, wherever we are. GPS releases the space in our gloves compartment and ended the era of passengers who handled the heavy Atlas on the way. The world continues to move and everything becomes easier – until not.
Sometimes, whether through problems with the technology itself, evil intentions, or user mistakes, our technology is really a banana and doing things that we have never expected to do. Technology may actually not be evil in the most stringent sense, but sometimes it is really acting like that.
Alexa tells a child to electrocute themselves
Pandemic has made us all spend more time at home than usual and some of us have children to be entertained. Sometimes that means you finally rub the bottom of the barrel game and you start asking for help from your virtual assistant.
In December 2021, a mother at home with her ten -year -old daughter when they began to ask for Alexa’s challenges that they could finish to spend time. Did Alexa tell them to stand on their heads or recite the alphabet backwards? Not. Instead, it suggested that they plug in the charger in the middle of the road and touch one cent to an open branch, (per gamer). Fortunately, the mother intervened and the child was smart enough to not heed the advice that doubted Alexa.
Virtual Assistant Work Partly by combing the internet for popular responses to the term search that they passed with friendly sounds or displayed as text on the screen (per making us from). Unfortunately, that means sometimes it might provide unwanted information, if the results are popular enough to exceed the search graph. Amazon quickly patch his services to prevent the advice in the future.
From the “terminator” to the killer robot “The Matrix” is a Dystopian science fiction staple. We tend to imagine mechanical killers as sophisticated robots from the future, not factory floor workers from the 1970s. In this case, reality is stranger than fiction.
Obert Williams is a factory worker for the Ford Motor Company who works with automatic robots on the factory floor. On January 25, 1979, he became the first death in our cohabitation with a robot. One ton automatic machine job is to move spare parts from shelves to other locations in the factory. As explained by Guinness World Records, Williams noticed that the robot walked slowly and went up to the shelf to take some parts of his own. That’s when a fatal event occurred.
The robot’s arm crashed into Williams’s head, resulting in his death. When automation becomes more everywhere and the potential for humans and machines to occupy the same space increase, robot needs with greater spatial intelligence will be very important. Scientists work to develop robots with human level awareness about their environment that will not only increase the number of tasks they can complete, but will also make them safer (per science every day).