>people sign a disclaimer about the risks, they can not be held responsible.

This isn’t adequate in civilized countries. You can’t run an amusement park that severs the limbs of 1% of the participants under the protection of a disclaimer.

There is a threshold where it’s acceptable though.

For example: the general rate of skiing injuries is about 1 injury per thousand skier days. Ski resorts will sell a day pass to let you experience that 0.1% injury risk as Long as you sign a disclaimer.

A ski lift that breaks legs one day per thousand would never be acceptable. Risk imposed on you by someone else or a machine operated by someone else is not at all like a risk imposed on yourself by you personally skiing with your own legs off the mountain, into an unmechanized tree.

IMO there is a huge difference between something that brings mechanical force to you (robot, ski lift) vs you bringing mechanical force onto something else (crash into rock/tree while skiing).

> A ski lift that breaks legs one day per thousand would never be acceptable.

People are injured getting off ski lifts all the time.

Ski lift fatality rate is about 1/10 of cars, with only one death per 700 million miles traveled and average of 0.34 deaths per year.

Ski lift is one of the safest modes of transports known to man. It probably saves many lives vs someone walking up the mountain. That is, unlike the chess robot it creates a comparative net decline in risk for achieving the task of climbing a mountain. A wildly overbuilt (for the task) industrial robot as designed in this configuration here creates a net increase in risk vs playing against a much weaker human hand.

https://www.missionridge.com/sites/default/files/NSAA%20Lift...

Fatality rate from ski lifts may be very, very low. But number of broken limbs per user are probably relatively high compared to other modes of transportation. (Especially I think in small pull-based lifts)

>>> A ski lift that breaks legs one day per thousand would never be acceptable.

>> People are injured getting off ski lifts all the time.

> Ski lift fatality rate is about...

I see what you did there.

Wow you are incredibly clever, would you like a cookie? The best you could do is sometime, somewhere, people get injured a ski lift. The same could be said for people walking up a mountain. AT least I provided some data, including a study that showed injuries.

>"It probably saves many lives vs someone walking up the mountain."

You say "probably". Means you have no clue whether it is a fact or just invention of your mind. Then why bring it up as an argument.

Well I do have a "clue." Fatality rates for walking are imperfect but some studies have put them around ~37/billion kilometers walked [0]. For Ski lifts, it is 0.93 per billion kilometers. That's over an order magnitude worse for walking.

Now most people don't walk on mountains, so it's not a direct comparison. Walking on sidewalk is often a well paved, but with the risk of cars. Cars usually aren't on mountains, but on the other hand the conditions are oft very inclined with ice/snow, with difficult walking that can lend towards inducing casualties. My educated guess are these tradeoffs aren't enough to overcome the order of magnitude higher rate found in walking vs ski lift in our imperfect comparison across studies.

The honest answer is the word "probably" was used to denote the evidence points my mind in that direction, in a way that appears reasonable at least to me and probably many readers here. But if I want to use the bad faith accusatory tone you've presented, then I'd just say I said it to annoy persons such as yourself for my personal amusement.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221414051....

You've clearly never heard of Action Park, though not quite 1%.

You can't just 'waive' criminal responsebility - if I have a dangerous dog or industrial machinery that chops off hands, it doesn't matter what piece of paper the kid or the legal guardians sign, If I purposefully let kids play with them, I have put kdis in harms way.

> industrial machinery that chops off hands

In the US South there's a ton of poultry workers that have lost fingers and parts of hands to machinery. It's gotten a lot better lately, but for a long time it was a very bad problem. Since most of these workers were Black or from Latin America, there was very little was done to protect them.

"Since most of these workers were Black or from Latin America,"

more like, "Since most of these workers are poor,"

You're welcome to challenge the "it's not race, it's poverty" assertion anytime you want by hopping on a flight to Shreveport, Alexandria, or Opelousas, and just walking around. In places like that, where the population is about 50% black, and 50% of the population is under the poverty line, you'll notice that nearly 100% of the non-managerial people working at fast food places are non-white.

I don't know what the appropriate coin-flipping analogy is, but it's like getting heads a lot of times.

It’s America and it’s about race because if you look like the people this country historically extracted free labor from, then you are much more likely to be treated poorly for profit. Being poor is different than being poor and black or latino in America. Our livelihoods ride on the manufactured failure of specific groups of people for political reasons. Then here you come calling it all poor people, erasing the specific struggles that enable the system. If you are going to argue on behalf of white people, which ones? What are the lineages of people who were affected most? Who cause the harm? Was redress made?

American Descendents of Slavery haven’t gotten their reparations yet, and LatAm is still an American-managed cluster fuck.

That's trully atrocious.

When it comes to children there is an additional level of responsebvility that cannot be 'waived' away.

For instance if children tresspass onto your land and hurt themselves, you could be held legally responsible under the doctrine of 'Attractive nuisance'

Setting responsibility on guardians for not having forseen or prevented that is a slippery slope, or at least leads to unintended consequences.

Imagine a world where guardians will never let a kid go somewhere or do something that they don’t have 100% knowledge of, or aren’t 100% sure it’s perfectly safe.

In this specific case:

- you wouldn’t expect that issue at first sight

- it looks fun enough to give it a try

- the kid disn’t die. It truely hurts and can have long lasting damages if not treated properly, but a finger broken is not the end of the world for the kid.

If this was any workplace in many countries, the robot owner would totally be culpable, even if it wasn't a child. There's a reason that people are not allowed near robots in many cases.

This is why in civilized societies the government mandates minimum safety standards so that a company is not even allowed to place such dangerous equipment around people.

You wouldn't be allowed to build a mangler anymore in a civilized society, waiver or no.

That why in civilized societies use illegal immigrants or put the factory in other countries who have less safety regulations and then import it, or have corporationsso big that they are untouchable.

I'm pretty sure there is only a tiny fraction of the population that is even willing to press the emergency stop when something bad happens. Most likely they will scream or freeze in place instead.

Quoting from anothing reply: Video of the incident: https://twitter.com/xakpc/status/1550224137041371144

There is not even an e-stop.

Although I can imagine what it sounded like at the scene though. "Ay Blin" and then people scurrying around looking for the power plug of the robot or hopelessly trying to overpower a heavily geared joint motor.