Teaching robots to punch and understand what pain is

They promise to stop punching you if you ask nicely. Really.

Short version: Part of an ongoing research project to figure out how to explain "pain" to robots involves encouraging robots to inflict pain. The above image is of a robot programmed to punch people harder and harder until the test makers (test subjects?) say the word "Mercy". Then it will stop.

I don't have anything to add but to acknowledge that this exists.

We are doomed, they have a taste for blood run for the hills while you still can! Here comes Skynet.

On a more serious note I hardly see how this will actually amount to anything. Since we have yet to generate a self thinking AI (so I believe), robots are just purely computer code. Couldn't a pain threshold be coded into the software of the robot without beating people up?

Yes, and once robots "understand" pain and know how it can be used to influence the reactions of others then they will become much more efficient torturers and killers...

It's sad that every time a news story like this pops up about advances in robotics I have to think to myself, "Have these scientists ever actually seen a movie like Terminator?!?"

Scientist is dumb!

Those Epson robots should measure the amount of pain every time someone buys a replacement ink cartridge.

Unforunately people lie so the only way to really test this would be to beat one of them to death.

The robots want to understand pain so they can inflict it.

After pain, we teach it love, and then it explodes.

So, we have a backup plan if it goes wrong.

"Shall we play a game?"
"Ok."
"Slug Bug!!!"

I, for one, welcome our pain-understanding-punching robot overlords.

What exactly is this for?

We had pain / flinch responses long before we became intelligent. It's another step to producing "artificial Human intelligence". We already have plenty of artificial non-human intelligence, we've already got programs that can make other programs, etc. They're not Human like, though. These, I would guess, would have the benefit of understanding 'ow'. I wouldn't say they should "encourage" a program/bot to do this, I wonder if they'd ever think of giving them a feedback loop so that the harder they punch the other guy, the more it hurts them...

I don't understand the significance of this either. Are they trying to make the robot differentiate between the amount of pain inflicted on a "punch" to the stomach vs. a "punch" to the shin or to the head? What about the difference between the pain threshold of an adult vs. a child? What about two people who are very similar that have very different pain thresholds?

So let's list the recent robot innovations.


Robots with emotions.
Robots who can lie.
The ability to shoot arrows.
The ability to understand pain.


So basically we've got a robot who can get angry at us, lie to us about it's intentions, and then cap us in the head while our back is turned.

Am I the only one who imediately started thinking of rock em sock em robots? hehe

All I can think of is Short Circuit after Johnny 5 turns the other bots into the 3 Stooges.