(StraightNews.org) – A robot attacked an engineer at a plant in Texas, sinking its claws into the man’s back and arm. The incident, which occurred in 2021 but has just been made public, happened at the Giga Texas factory near Austin and was witnessed by two of the victim’s colleagues. The robot, apparently malfunctioning, pinned the engineer to a wall and left him with open wounds.
A report on the incident was filed with Travis County and federal regulators, but no similar events were recorded in 2021 or 2022. An attorney told the Daily Mail, which broke the story, that such “attacks” by machines are under-reported.
Hannah Alexander of the nonprofit Workers Defense Project said, “We’ve had multiple workers who were injured and one worker who died, whose injuries or death are not in these reports.”
In 2020, a California regulator agreed with Alexander’s assessment and said Tesla omitted hundreds of staff injuries from its annual reports to official agencies. The company faced similar accusations in 2017 when an investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that Tesla either failed to report injuries or misclassified them.
Some experts are expressing concern about the growth of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on human beings – both physically and psychologically. The National University of Singapore conducted a significant study in 2022 and found that introducing “robots” or AI contributes to uncivil behavior between colleagues as job insecurity rises and morale falls.
However, one of the study’s authors said some fears about technology are misplaced. “Most people are overestimating the capabilities of robots and underestimating their own capabilities,” said Dr Kai Chi Yam, who led the investigation.
Nevertheless, some fears appear legitimate, particularly in the medical field. An examination of the impact of surgical robots found they were linked to 144 deaths and more than 1,000 injuries in the US over a 14-year period. These were caused by malfunctions in machines designed to carry out surgical tasks.
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