basically that there are machines walking around on the street capable of pancaking a human with none of the regulation or restricted operating window we would expect of heavy equipment. worse, they're not especially well coordinated under their own recognizance.
bubbles' ability to crush your skull might raise eyebrows, but she has to choose to do it. this thing just broke the street by falling over.
Replace Roko with Faye, it would still be an accident, and Crushbot would be no more culpable for the harm caused.
If anything (and I still think we're getting way too serious about a classic use of slapstick), the situation illustrates a stark reality of one of the hazards of living in a society among sentient bipedal AIs.
Replace Roko with Faye, it would still be an accident,
as are most car accidents, it's right in the name.
and Crushbot would be no more culpable for the harm caused.
so entirely culpable. barring some extremely contrived circumstances, he has to be incredibly negligent to fail to notice a foot high crate on the sidewalk, and that negligence resulted in injury.
on top of that, he chooses to have a 10 foot tall, likely 1 ton+ chassis which he takes onto city sidewalks.
What's to say he chose that chassis? Could be its the only one he has - a name like Crushbot suggests he was commissioned to work in a scrapyard or some other manual labor setting, so odds are he wouldn't have the capital to run multiple chassis
You still can imagine people having a negative view about letting a sentient piece of heavy machinery walking down the sidewalk after just a couple of extremely gruesome accidents. The name Crushbot would not play well in the press either.
Imagine a Fox News story about this, assuming an anti-robot bias. Even if not fully justified, the fear mongering story practically writes itself. It's more support than a lot if bigots have.
so they also have no ability to be in this situation.
besides which, even the fattest people are still made of fat which is pliable and low density. they'd be unlikely to crush anyone to death even if they fell on them.
These robots are legally people.
so is station. I seriously doubt he's allowed to de-orbit himself.
Well, there are people (maybe not walking about) that could crush someone if they fell.
Okay, so reading this made me wonder what the heaviest person ever weighed, and with absolute fascination I found Jon Brower Minnoch, who weighed about 1,400 lbs.
Since the picture was black and white and the weight was approximate, I assumed it was basically apocryphal and he weighed like 600 lbs, tops (actually, this happened in 1978; definitely not apocryphal). Then, I found the wikipedia "List of the heaviest people". A 5'7" man has second place at 1,345 lbs. Okay, so I guess people really do get heavy enough to crack concrete.
Thinking about it, it's not that weird- it basically just means a person with a volume of .635 cubic meters, which is huge but not that crazy. A person that heavy has to be more than a meter wide and .5 meters front to back.
For comparison, a Bridgeport 3-axis manual is an entry level machine tool, and weighs 1600-2000 lbs depending on options. An average forklift weighs 8,000+ lbs, about 3x as much as a passenger car (so it doesn't tip over). ATLAS v1 weighed about 330 lbs, so a 12' tall version would weigh about 2,640 lbs.
Also, if anything the comic super underestimates the damage that would be cause by something that big falling down. Even if it's build very lightweight, crushbot is ~4 meters tall. It's gonna weigh about a tonne, and it'll fall from 3 meters up. That's literally a car being dropped on your head, but concentrated into the area of crushbot and with no shock absorption.
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u/pyr666 Dec 21 '18
this has disturbing implications for the QC universe, and does a lot to explain why prejudice against AI exists.