On Robots Killing People
&gt; the robot simply determined that “the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to push the worker into an adjacent machine.”<p>This seems inflammatory and highly misleading. I could be wrong, but I <i>highly</i> doubt it: the robot didn&#x27;t &quot;determine&quot; anything. It had assembly instructions to follow, and it followed them. The worker got in the way and was struck.<p>Schneier falls into this same error, saying Tesla Autopilot sometimes &quot;ignor[es] red lights, stop signs, and crosswalks.&quot; Tesla isn&#x27;t perfect, but I&#x27;m pretty confident there&#x27;s no code in Autopilot that says, &quot;yeah, I see that crosswalk, but Elon&#x27;s in a hurry, so let&#x27;s goooo!&quot; -- okay, <i>maybe</i> in Elon mode. But not in general. So no, Autopilot doesn&#x27;t &quot;ignore&quot; those items: it misses them.<p>Assigning intention to robots at this point is pretty much equivalent to assigning intention to a clock because the hands go around. We have a <i>long</i> way to go before we can&#x2F;should assign intentionality to &quot;robots&quot; this way. Of course, at the rate things are going, &quot;a long way&quot; could happen in the next few years. But it&#x27;s not happening now. I&#x27;ll happily consider counter-examples.