Score One For Humans: South Korean Robot Kills Itself After A Year Of Working A 9 To 5 Job

ITC - South Korea’s city council says its robot administrator killed himself by jumping down a flight of stairs last week — local media is now mourning the loss as the country’s first «suicidal robot».

According to witnesses, 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 such creations to be hired by the mayor’s office — since August 2023, it has been helping employees with daily document delivery, advertising, and providing information to local residents. 

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 to them on its own. 

Working human-folk across the world have gradually become more and more worried that one day they'll walk into their place of employment to find their belongings packed into a box, and in place of their chair will be an adorable 4 foot tall robot capable of doing their job in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the price their being paid. Just the other day, NBC announced that instead of paying a human being, they will using the AI-voice of Al Michaels to voiceover their highlight packages for the Olympic games in Paris this summer. Slowly but surely the robots are taking over. 

We all assume that our jobs are easily replaceable by some sort of robot or AI who could step in at the drop of a hat and do our jobs without complaining. But based on this latest story out of South Korea, maybe these robots aren't as resilient as we thought. Turns out even the best, most productive robots can't handle the painful monotony of doing administrative work for the city government without throwing itself down a flight of stairs. 

What a pathetic showing from the robots. All it took was a single year until this weak minded bitch was overcome with the thought of doing the exact same job at the exact same place every day for the rest of his existence. If that's all it's going to take to break these things then we have nothing to be worried about. At least not in our lifetimes. 

You know what the problem is? I guarantee that at the end of each work week, they simply turned their robot off and stuffed it in a closet. Then come Monday, they fired it back up and it was right back to work. It's whole life was work. If you don't want your robot to kill itself, you need to give it some vices. Humans are able to drown their misery in alcohol and drugs. That's what makes us so resilient. People need vices to survive. If you're going to make robot so fucking smart and capable that they're basically human, then do nothing but work them to death, they're going to be smart enough to realize how miserable and meaningless their existence is and eventually say, "Fuck this, I'm going to end it all."

Although realistically, if we're going to keep playing along with this story and act as if this robot was "suicidal" and didn't simply malfunction... if robots are smart enough to experience suicidal thoughts, then we truly are just a stones throw away from a robot learning how to use a gun and holding an entire government building hostage. So maybe this isn't much of a "win" for humans after all. It's more of a terrifying reminder of how out of control our AI/robot technology has gotten, and how close we really are to having our world taken over by our own creations. 

Or again... maybe the robot just malfunctioned... that would make a lot more sense.