rigorousintuition.ca

marmot wrote:the robot uprising began a long time ago, ok. before the eighties, before MKUltra, before Metropolis, before a long time ago. press me for references if you want, been going on for a long time now, bud.

actually kos, i was thinking of a number of things - from mind-controlled human robots to an industrial robot who killed a man in the early 80's. there was a 'robot' thread on this a couple years ago and i spent about twenty-some minutes trying to find it - to no avail. sorry now - i'm running up against my bedtime here - but you get the picture. in any case, i was being a little tongue-in-cheeky too. thanks for the thread Wink

37-year-old Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker, was killed in 1981. Urada was performing routine maintenance on the robot, but neglected to shut it down properly, and was accidentally pushed into a grinding machine.

brekin wrote:If I recall correctly in The Big Book of Death it talks about the first person being killed by a robot was a Japanese auto worker who was accidentally "disassembled" on the assembly line when he was grabbed by one of the robotic arms.

Wikipedia has he was pushed into a grinder by the robotic arm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot

37-year-old Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker, was killed in 1981. Urada was performing routine maintenance on the robot, but neglected to shut it down properly, and was accidentally pushed into a grinding machine.

Last month automaker Toyota announced a recall of 160,000 of its Prius hybrid vehicles following reports of vehicle warning lights illuminating for no reason, and cars' gasoline engines stalling unexpectedly. But unlike the large-scale auto recalls of years past, the root of the Prius issue wasn't a hardware problem -- it was a programming error in the smart car's embedded code. The Prius had a software bug.

With that recall, the Prius joined the ranks of the buggy computer -- a club that began in 1945 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark II system.The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

Sixty years later, computer bugs are still with us, and show no sign of going extinct. As the line between software and hardware blurs, coding errors are increasingly playing tricks on our daily lives. Bugs don't just inhabit our operating systems and applications -- today they lurk within our cell phones and our pacemakers, our power plants and medical equipment. And now, in our cars.

But which are the worst?