Chess-playing robot not above breaking a child's finger for the big win

You might not expect injuries during a chess match, but it seems robot players are changing the game

At the Moscow Open last week, a chess-playing robot grabbed and broke the finger of its opponent — a seven-year-old boy.

A video which was published by the Telegram channel of Russian media site Baza and then picked up by The Guardian, shows the robot reaching for the child's hand across the chess board and not letting go. After a few seconds, two men rush over to the boy and appear to wrench his hand free from the robot's grasp.

Sergey Smagin, vice president of the Russian Chess Federation, told Baza that the robot reacted this way because the boy rushed to make a return move after the robot took one of his pieces. "The robot did not like such a hurry — he grabbed the boy's index finger and squeezed it hard" said Smagin in a translated statement. "The people around rushed to help and pulled out the finger of the young player, but the fracture could not be avoided."

No longer a sci-fi fantasy, AI and robotics are playing an increasingly bigger role in human society. And their rapid advancement often stirs up fears about playing god, opening Pandora's box, or some kind of robot takeover. Recently, a Google engineer was fired for saying the company's AI technology LaMDA had become sentient.

AI and robotics have made many positive contributions to society — just look at those robot dogs and robot vacuums. But breaking a child's finger is not a good look for the robot movement. As president of the Moscow Chess Federation Sergey Lazarev succinctly told the TASS news agency, “This is of course bad.”

That is of course an understatement.