Speaking to the Associated Press about the death of a vegetable warehouse employee gruesomely killed by the pincers of an overeager industrial sorting robot, police in Gosong, South Korea on Thursday kind of blamed the victim for unintentionally siccing the simple-minded machine on him.
“It wasn’t an advanced, artificial intelligence-powered robot, but a machine that simply picks up boxes and puts them on pallets,” said Gosong detective Kang Jin-gi, making excuses for the technological terror that lifted the man up and crushed him on a conveyor belt simply for walking too close to its optical scanner whilst carrying a box of bell peppers. “It’s clearly not a case where a robot confused a human with a box – this wasn’t a very sophisticated machine,” said another law enforcement official, evidently similarly reluctant to bury himself and his colleagues with a likely unfathomable amount of paperwork involved with charging a robot with negligent homicide.
For the Gosong PD it’s basically an open-and-shut case of “Robot too stupid to commit murder, let insurance company and civil courts decide while we go work on convenience store stick-ups and pull over drivers for speeding… unless they’re self-driving cars. We’re staying out of that shit too.”