Incident 152: SoftBank's Humanoid Robot, Pepper, Reportedly Frequently Made Errors, Prompting Dismissal

Description: SoftBank's robot allegedly kept making mechanical errors, taking unplanned breaks, failing to recognize previously-met people, and breaking down during practice runs.

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Alleged: Aldebaran and SoftBank Robotics developed an AI system deployed by , which harmed SoftBank.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

152

Report Count

Incident Date

2021-07-13

Editors

Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Humanoid Robot Keeps Getting Fired From His Jobs

wsj.com

Softbank's Hyped Robot Keeps Failing at Its Jobs

inc.com

wsj.com · 2021

TOKYO—Having a robot read scripture to mourners seemed like a cost-effective idea to the people at Nissei Eco Co., a plastics manufacturer with a sideline in the funeral business.

The company hired child-sized robot Pepper, clothed it in th…

inc.com · 2021

Maybe the robots aren't coming for your jobs just yet.

Pepper, a humanoid robot from Japanese VC firm SoftBank, burst onto the scene in 2014 to considerable fanfare and media coverage. Since then, however, the bot has failed at many of the …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.