Linda Moulton Howe's Robot Uprising Conspiracy Theory

About

Linda Moulton Howe's Robot Uprising Conspiracy Theory refers to an unsubstantiated story that four robots had killed several scientists in a Japanese laboratory, which has been purported by famed conspiracy theorist Linda Moulton Howe. Various fact checking agencies have since declared the viral story false.

Origin

On February 10th, 2018, conspiracy theorist Linda Moulton Howe delivered a presentation entitled "Is A. I. An Existential Threat to Human Civilization?" at the Los Angeles Conscious Life Expo.^[1] During her speech, Howe reported, "At a top robotics company in Japan this week, four robots being developed for military applications killed 29 humans in the lab, and they did it by shoot, what he called, 'metal bullets'[…] The scariest part is that lab workers deactivated two robots and took apart the third. But the fourth robot began restoring itself and somehow connected to an orbiting satellite to download information to rebuild itself even more strongly than before.”

She offers no evidence for the story and relies on a single, anonymous source.

On September 6th, 2018, the YouTube channel UAMN TV published a video of the talk. Within three months, the video has received more than 60,000 views (shown below).

Spread

On December 15th, 2018, Instagram ^[2] user @siriusknowledge posted a portion of the video on the site, adding a newspaper-style headline and slug to the top of the video. The post received more than 47,000 views in four days (shown below, left).

Two days later, Twitter ^[3] user @andreliftss tweeted the video and added the caption, "This how we all gonna die." The tweet received more than 133,000 retweets, 272,000 likes and 7 million views in three days (shown below, right).

On December 19th, in a video uploaded by the YouTube channel Yon World, Howe continued to discuss the theory (shown below).

That day, the fact-checking website Snopes ^[4] rated the story "False." In their assessment, the site wrote:

"At best, the claim that 29 scientists were killed by AI robots in Japan is based on third-hand information unsupported by any actual evidence. At worst, this rumor was made up out of whole cloth as an attention-grabbing anecdote for a speech about how human beings are merely the artificially intelligent creations of an alien race."

Additionally, on December 19th, The Daily Dot ^[5] published a story about the conspiracy theory.

Search Interest

External References