The news cycle dragged itself out of the Christmas hangover with headlines such as the Daily Mail’s:

Tesla robot ATTACKS an engineer at company’s Texas factory during violent malfunction – leaving ‘trail of blood’ and forcing workers to hit emergency shutdown button.

Although arguably The Mirror US cooked up a more impressive: Tesla factory worker ravaged by robot that ‘dug its claws into his arm and back’. They should have subtitled that one, Fifty Shades of Carbon Fibre.

If all you did last week between turkey and wine was cruise the headlines, you may be left with the impression that Elon Musk’s Giga factory in Texas has gone full Skynet. That the robots have achieved sentience. They’re rebelling. And we’re all going to die.

Well, not quite.

As is usually the case with these click-bait moments, the truth is closer to ‘industrial accident’ than Terminator.

Tesla’s high-tech Giga factory relies heavily on automation and robotic assistance – as do most modern car manufacturing plants. The accident in question was explained in an incident report where one of the employees was injured by a robot designed to handle aluminium car parts after they had been cast.

Instead of picking up a car part, in 2021, one robot allegedly grabbed onto the worker instead, pushing its robotic ‘claws’ into his arm and back creating open wounds that bled over the factory. It happened when the robot was apparently accidentally left switched on while changes were being made to software for two other disabled robots nearby.

As reported by the Daily Mail:

The two eyewitnesses to the event – which occurred in the section of the Texas factory floor where vehicle chassis are first assembled – told reporters for The Information a more harrowing story, however.

As the bleeding Tesla engineer attempted to wrestle free from the assembly robot’s grasp, another worker hit an emergency ‘stop’ button to end the attack.

Once free, the engineer fell ‘a couple of feet down a chute designed to collect scrap aluminium, leaving a trail of blood behind him’, according to The Information, a subscription-based tech news site.

The worker wasn’t ‘ravaged’ and there was no intelligent intent behind its actions. It was an empty, soulless machine malfunctioning just as the old cotton mills crushed people’s hands and ripped the scalps off children indentured to work in the so-called ‘privileged’ West. Robots do not do ‘malice’, they do whoops!

When the emergency stop button was pressed by factory workers, the Tesla robot stopped. It didn’t throw on a pair of shades, deliver a deadpan quip to the security camera, and jump down the shaft after its victim. So you can all relax.

There appears to be nothing unusual or amiss about robot accidents within the Tesla family. When it comes to humans working beside machinery, we’re in the safest era.

A better explanation for the creative headlines comes from an ongoing fascination (concern?) regarding Elon Musk’s exploration of Artificial Intelligence and humanoid robots which we’ve seen grace our theatre screens for over a century. From Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke to Ridley Scott and James Cameron, the message is the same: don’t play god with silicon.

Human society created machines to free us from the moral quandary of slavery – the labour which built the ancient world. Our future was intended to rise on the guilt-free work of machines – inanimate creations that humans could use to make things, explore, wage war, and screw without worrying about exploitation.

Science fiction authors warned that any attempt to breathe artificial life into these mechanical slaves would open up a civilisation-destroying problem in which humans would either be killed by their silicon children, enslaved, or forced to destroy robots and return to humanity to the workhouse.

The obvious solution to this problem is not to create it in the first place. Humans already have biological children, we don’t need to make digital life only to sit it down and explain that its species exists to serve. It would be like that scene in Rick and Morty where the mad scientist builds a self-aware robot who asks its creator what its purpose is, to which the response is, ‘Pass the butter…’ The robot looks down at its little clawed hands and replies, ‘Oh-my-god.’

Not everyone developing AI has a god complex. That is a misconception. There are plenty of engineers and programmers out there who seek AI because they believe computers will be smarter than us, solve unsolvable problems, operate autonomously in landscapes humans cannot reach, and replace jobs that require moral problem-solving.

Artificial Intelligence cannot achieve these aims without being alive, and a creature that is alive cannot be trusted with these tasks.

A robot that can navigate a burning building, pick up a human, and carry them to safety is very useful. A robot that sits there and ponders whether or not that human deserves to live based upon their social credit score and monthly carbon emissions would be a nightmare and yet it is the work of moments to replace human morality with a clinical equation. Humans are subjective, chaotic, emotional, and ultimately unpredictable. Robots are terrible at these things because they are built in the language of logic. We make choices in seconds that a computer cannot fathom because it has no calculation for love.

Politicians are rarely consumers of science fiction and are almost never knowledgeable in the hard sciences. Only recently have a handful of world leaders started asking questions regarding the safety of these robotic and AI developments, but the end result saw those politicians swept up into the arms of AI manufacturers. They are trusting that the industry will regulate itself correctly. Given that the development of AI is a moral question for society, it should be put to a vote. Society, not scientists and not politicians, should decide if we ignore the warnings of fiction and dive into the biblical waters of creation.

Tesla, under the guidance of Elon Musk, is pursuing the aesthetics of humanoid robots. Optimus, for example, was presented to the world in 2021. As with his vehicles, the aim is to mass produce a product for market somewhere around the 2025-27 mark.

There are some weird robots out there already, with design teams heading along diverging paths that will one day be brought together in a single machine. Some are working in the arts and social sphere, attempting to mimic ‘life’. Others are pursuing medical robots to handle an ageing society, although the main application will probably be what it’s always been – factory labour.

Watching promo videos for all of these humanoid robot videos, we cannot escape the appearance that humanity has come full circle, having found a way to once again employ slaves within the home. It’s almost as if we never really let go of our desire to transfer our tasks to someone who cannot refuse or complain.

And that’s fine… So long as we don’t give this generation of slaves sentience. That would be really dumb, even by human standards.