Today in 1984, a factory robot in Jackson, Michigan, crushed a 34 year-old worker in the first ever robot-related death in the United States.
The robot thus violated Issac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics, “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,” first articulated in 1942.
In 2008, “Roboticist” Rodney Books predicted: “[In the 1950s, when I was born] there were very few computers in the world, and today there are more microprocessors than there are people. Now, it almost seems plausible that in my lifetime, the number of robots could also exceed the number of people.”
In 2023, the stock of operational industrial robots around the globe hit a new record of about 3.5 million units, according to the International Federation of Robotics. But if we include consumer robots such as the Roomba, Brooks’s first commercial venture, his prediction came true probably no more than a few years after it was made, with 14 million Roombas sold by 2016.
On May 30, 2023, more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in AI, issued a one-sentence warning: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”