New footage captures the moment a woman loses her cool with a robot receptionist and smashes it up with a plank of wood.
The bizarre incident, which took place at a hospital in China, shows the unidentified woman beating the unfortunate machine five times while shouting furiously.
Fragments of the bot are sent spinning across the lobby floor as she delivers powerful blows to its head and torso.
But despite the damage inflicted on it, the plucky robot appears to survive the savage attack when it turns its head and lifts its right arm.
Robots can also be the perpetrators of violence, as demonstrated last year when a chess-playing machine broke a child’s finger in Moscow.
Fragments of the poor robot are sent spinning across the floor as she delivers powerful blows to its head and torso.
According to Jiangxi Morning News, the recent incident took place at Affiliated Hospital of Xuzhou Medical University in the city of Xuzhou.
READ MORE: Chess bot breaks boy’s finger
A chess-playing robot (pictured) broke a child’s finger during an international tournament in Moscow in 2022
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Staff at the hospital judged that the woman had a ‘mental problem’, according to the Chinese site, and the police eventually intervened.
Bystanders in the hospital lobby can be seen staring from a distance as the extraordinary occurrence takes place.
In between strikes, the woman shouts at the machine while brandishing the plank of wood menacingly.
The video was circulated on Chinese social media network Weibo before being posted to Twitter by @songpinganq.
The Twitter user suggested the woman in the video was a patient at the hospital who grew angry at the waiting times.
‘Because now in China’s hospitals, make the doctor and all medical examination appointments are all done on the robots, very few nurses left to help the patients. Many find it a frustrating process,’ @songpinganq said.
The robot is positioned in front of the hospital’s reception desk, so it could have been the first port of call for new patients – although there are human staff sat behind the desk.
The bizarre incident, which took place at a hospital in China, shows the unidentified woman beating the unfortunate machine five times – although the attack appears to have started before the footage commences
Staff at the Xuzhou hospital judged that the woman had a ‘mental problem’, according to Jiangxi Morning News
It’s unclear if the woman, who sports short cropped hair and a yellow jacket, is still in police custody.
But the event could symbolise a general sense of unease surrounding the reliance of technology on public-facing roles that used to be taken by humans.
China is a leader in workplace automation and is known to have replaced human workers with machines in fields such as manufacturing and hospitality.
According to a 2016 report, more and more factories in China are using robots on the assembly lines to replace workers who demand high salaries.
China’s leading AI expert Kai-Fu Lee has previously predicted that technology will take over half of all jobs by the mid-2030s.
Certain employment sectors are facing a crisis ‘akin to that faced by farmers during the industrial revolution’, he said.
Unfortunately, history has shown that robots can backfire in the workplace, leading to gruesome injuries and fatalities.
One of the most gruesome robo-accidents involved a 49-year-old Chinese factory worker, known as Zhou, back in December 2018.
Zhou was hit by a rogue robot that collapsed suddenly, impaling him with 10 sharp steel rods in the arm and chest, each one foot long.
The first person to be killed by a robot was Robert Williams, an American factory worker, in Flat Rock, Michigan back in January 1979.
Williams, 25, was killed instantly when he was struck in the head by an industrial robot arm designed to retrieve objects from storage shelves.
Read MailOnline’s summary of the worst robotic accidents in history here.
