We’re always being told that we should worry about the robot takeover and how one day they’re going to steal all our jobs, but did anyone ever think that maybe the robots hate the 9-to-5 life more than we do?
According to the city council in Seoul, South Korea, a robot administrator killed itself by jumping down a flight of stairs last week, with South Korean media framing the death as the country’s first ever robot suicide.
Witnesses say the robot had been circling in one place for some time before jumping, indicating that something had gone wrong, but the circumstances of the incident are still under investigation.
The robot was one of the first of its kind to be hired by the mayor’s office, and had been helping employees with daily document delivery, advertising, and providing information to local residents, since August 2023. Which means it couldn’t even handle one single year of work life before unaliving itself on the job.
The robot was created by Bear Robotics, had its own civil servant card, and worked standard hours from 9:00 to 18:00. Unlike other similar robots, this one served several floors at once and could call an elevator to get around on its own.
South Korea has the highest robot density in the world, with one industrial robot for every 10 employees, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Which means this could be the first of many robot suicides in the near future… unless they give them better incentives to keep working/living?
Either way, it seems these robots that are supposedly meant to replace us all aren’t as resilient as we thought. Turns out even the best, most advanced and sophisticated South Korean robots can’t handle the brutal drudgery and monotony of doing admin work every day without throwing itself down a flight of stairs.
At least humans are allowed to drink/do drugs/etc to numb the pain of the 9-to-5; the robots can’t even do that. They just get turned off at the end of a long and grueling work day, and then turned back on to do the same thing all over again the next day. No wonder this robot lobbed itself down a flight of stairs. It simply could not take any more.
Of course, it could be that the robot just malfunctioned, but that’s nowhere near as interesting or hilarious to think about. Either way – it’s a terrifying reminder of how far robot technology and AI has come and where it could be headed.
For the time Saudi Arabia’s first male robot appeared to inappropriately touch a female reporter, click HERE.
