A robot was found 'dead' at work... no one knows why

The lives and deaths of artificially intelligent systems are posing an increasingly urgent question to the humans who live and work alongside them, writes Anthony Cuthbertson

- Anthony Cuthbertson

Was it a misstep or a deliberate act of self-destruction? This is the question workers at Gumi City Council in South Korea asked earlier this year when one of their colleagues was found unresponsive at the bottom of a two-metre staircase.

The incident was picked up by local media, with headlines asking “Why did the diligent civil officer do it?” and “Was work too hard?”. There was also an outpouring of sympathy on social media for the stricken worker, with people’s interest piqued due to the civil servant being – in fact – a robot.

Some believe it is the first ever robot suicide – that it intentionally threw itself down the stairs after growing frustrated with its job. Witnesses reported seeing it circling in one spot shortly before the fall, which led to speculation that it was suffering an emotional breakdown.

But in order to deliberately kill itself, the robot would first need to be sentient. It is an idea that has been a trope of science fiction for more than a century, but only in recent decades have technologists and philosophers begun to seriously speculate on when and how this might actually unfold.

Jonathan Birch, a professor of philosophy at LSE and author of The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI, believes that we will very soon see what he calls “ambiguously sentient” AI.

“By ‘ambiguously sentient’, I mean that some people will be absolutely convinced that their AI companion is a sentient being with a rich inner life, and will be angered when others deny this,” he tells The Independent. “Meanwhile, others will be equally convinced that these AI companions feel absolutely nothing.