Revisiting the Misconception: The 'Suicidal Robot' Drowning Incident

A recent incident involving a robot found drowned in a fountain has sparked controversy, with some suggesting the device may have intentionally harmed itself. However, further investigation reveals that this was not the case. The truth unveils an unfortunate accident rather than an instance of self-harm or malfunction in AI systems.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.487, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.2 — similarity 0.467, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.460, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/68

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.