As i’m reading, obsessing and blogging about the quest for a robotic world mainly in Korea and Japan, i was wondering why i only stumble upon articles that present robots in a “positive” light.

Then Sascha sent me an article in german that reminded me that actually i sometimes find less cheerful stories. Like the one of a plant manager who got hit on the head and killed by a robotic arm or this wonderful post by Konomi describing how a security robot had attacked Junichiro Koizumi, the Richard Gere-like Japanese Prime Minister.

The Spiegel article is about the secret quality-assurance database that insurance companies have. Sasha translates “they wouldn’t have noticed by their statistics only that the so-called robodoc made a lot of mistakes. They were used and praised by orthopedists for years for the insertion of artificial hip joints. But actually, its failure-rate was way above (human) average and it was put out of service nationwide in 2004.”

Images are sculptures (part of the series “Killer Robot vs. Robot Killer”) by Finnish artist Oona Tikkaoja.