World’s first robot suicide? Android ‘rebels’ against monotonous housework (metro.co.uk)

     "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

That looks to be a very dead Roomba or Scooba... which do not live on kitchen countertops, and have no means of knowing that they're going onto a hot surface, as cleaning your counters is not an anticipated use case. They'll also turn on and clean on schedule, if that's what you've set them to do.

This isn't a case of "Robot suicide", rather of wilful neglect and the "murder" of an innocent appliance.

There's some "law" that says news headlines become more difficult to distinguish from satire.

I have trouble with stories from The Onion all the time.

Please tell me this is one where I'm just having trouble, and it's not actually real.

There is a serious point in relation to this which is that it is widely assumed that the solution to certain global problems is to build a friendly AGI. It will then cheerfully digest the web before instantly designing a safe power supply, space transport, solution to all remaining military conflicts, etc. Yet an AGI would be, after all, a person, and it might not enjoy reading billions of web pages, let alone doing my housework, much as I wish it would