California AI expert builds robot with sole purpose to stab people with needle

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) expert warned on Friday of teens losing their virginity to sex robots. While it is an alarming situation, could the bigger threat come from a robot built to stab people?

Sciencealert reports that Alexander Reben from the Stochasti Labs in Berkeley, California, an artist, roboticist and the creator of the deadly AI, unveiled on Tuesday a machine that was built only to harm humans by stabbing people with a needle. Reben says he made the first pain-inducing robot to force people who would volunteer to confront their fear of AI.

He believes the fear comes from robots having the capacity to impose physical danger on humans if things go wrong. There are also instances when AI have taken over jobs done by humans, causing further speculations of robots taking over Earth and killing humans.

His invention does not look anything like the humanoids in Japan. It is made up of a black box with a mechanical arm on its top. There is a pair or bracket where a person can place a finger inside. Once the robot is alerted of a finger’s presence, the arm swings over, jabs the finger which would bleed.

Reben admits the robot breaches the Three Laws of Robotics spelt out by Isaac Asimov in “Runaround,” a short story he wrote in 1942. The laws prohibits a robot from harming a human, mandates AI to obey orders from people, except if it would result in harming humans, and the robot must protect its existence.

His aim in creating the robot was “to take it out of the thought experiment realm into reality, because once something exists in the world, you have to confront it. It becomes more urgent. You can’t just pontificate about it.”

Growing concern over the capability of future robots not only to kill people but to decimate the human race caused AI experts at Google’s DeepMinds to develop a kill switch. Explaining the switch, the researchers wrote in a study published on the Machine Intelligence Research Institute website that “If an agent operating in real-time under human supervision, now and the it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions - - harmful either for the agent or for the environment,” quotes Computerworld.

VIDEO: The first law