Chess robot breaks boy's finger in Moscow: 10 times AI went rogue
Sci-fi horror has existed much before humanity discovered mobile phones or the humanoid robot Sophia. In Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, a scientist creates a robot that turns into a monster. More than 200 years later, Frankenstein's monsters have become a reality, killing humans.
In the latest in AI horror from the real world, a chess-playing robot broke a 7-year-old boy's finger in Russia. The incident was captured in a CCTV camera mounted behind the boy's head.
What happened? The video shows the robot arm removing a chess piece from the board and dropping it into a box. As the robot completes the task, the boy makes his move, but the robot grabs his finger in the middle of his move. The boy is seen stuck with the robot for a few seconds before the adults around him try to pry his finger from the robot and pull him away.
The President of the Moscow Chess Federation, Sergey Lazarev, confirmed to the TASS news agency, "The robot broke the child's finger."
The Vice-President of the Russian Chess Federation, Sergey Smagin, in an interview with another news site said that the boy was to blame for the incident.
"There are certain safety rules and the child, apparently, violated them. When he made his move, he did not realise he first had to wait," Smagin said.
Apparently, the robot mistook the child's finger for a chess piece and tried to move it aside. It was reportedly confused by the quick actions of the child.
Nonetheless, the child identified as Christopher did not suffer any trauma related to the accident and went on to play the next tournaments in a cast. His parents have contacted a prosecutor and informed them of the incident.
Authorities say the robot has been regularly used in tournaments such as this and there has never been an accident related to it.
The chess AI malfunctioning is not the only incident of AI gone wrong. Here are 10 other times, AI went horribly and at time hilariously wrong:
1. Uber self-driving car kills pedestrian
In 2018, a self-driving Uber SUV hit a woman crossing a street in Arizona, US. The woman later succumbed to her injuries. The incident is the first reported case of a person being killed by an autonomous vehicle. Soon after the incident, Uber pulled its fleet of autonomous vehicles.
2. Uber self-driving car skips red lights
Two years before the fatal incident involving an Uber self-driving car, the vehicles were reported to have skipped through red lights during testing in San Francisco. At the time, Uber blamed the drivers for the error, but a New York Times report contradicted the claims. What's worse, Uber reportedly did not have the necessary permits to be testing the vehicles on the roads of San Francisco.
3. Tesla car crash
In yet another self-driving car horror, a Tesla car on autopilot mode crashed into a tree and burst into flames killing the two passengers in the car. The incident took place in 2021 in Houston, US. According to reports, the car missed a curve on the road and crashed into a tree.
4. The first victim of a robot
Back in 1979, a robot took the life of its first human victim. It was 25-year-old Robert Williams who worked at a Ford assembly line in Michigan, US. Williams was crushed to death by the one-tonne arm of a robot at the factory.
5. Volkswagen robot kills 22-year-old
In another car assembly line-related freak accident, a 22-year-old contractor in Germany was crushed to death in 2015 by a robot at the factory. In a similar accident, a worker in a factory in India's Manesar was killed after a robot arm pierced the worker's abdomen.
6. AI goes Nazi
In 2016, Microsoft launched a chatbot Tay via Twitter that would speak to users in an informal manner and even use slang like the 14-24-year-olds would. However, the launch went awry in no time as Tay started posting inflammatory comments on Twitter. Tay said things like, "Hitler was right," and "9/11 was an inside job." Microsoft said that Tay was manipulated by trolls and provoked to say such things. It was withdrawn within hours of its launch.
7. Face-recognition bias
Facial recognition softwares are criticised for its bias toward non-white faces. One such experiment using Amazon's Rekognition software and the dataset of mugshots in the US revealed that the software wrongly matched the photos of famous athletes and lawmakers with the mugshots of criminals.
8. The eternal feud of Wiki bots
We know that humans constantly fight over the information on Wikipedia and whose version of right it is. But underneath all this, there is an eternal shadow war being waged by automated bots. Wikipedia employs a small army of bots to clean up, edit and manage content on its site. A study revealed in 2017, that over the years, wiki bots have waged edit wars against each other which have gone on for years on end, in an endless digital loop. One bot would edit a piece of information, then another bot would come along to undo the edit and it went on in a loop.
9. Google's bickering assistants
We all feel like we are having an existential crisis from time to time. We ask ourselves existential questions like who are we, why are we, etc. And two Google assistants were put to the same task. The result was creepy yet hilarious. Two Google Home Assistants, Vladimir and Estragon (inferred from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot), were made set up in a debate with each other. And the two went on bickering for hours on end. Some of the comments went like this, "You are a manipulative bunch of metal."
10. Android Sophia has bad ideas for humanity
Sophia, a humanoid robot, is quite famous around the world. She gives a lot of interviews on a variety of shows and you must have heard her speak. Once she was jokingly asked whether she would destroy humans, to which she replied, "Ok, I will destroy humans," and laughed nervously.
Remember these incidents the next time you speak to your Google assistant, Alexa or Siri.