Adam took us through some of the worst manglings and murders committed by appliances, from pitching machines to prison toilets. Dan and Jack showed us that lawnmowers and pajama zippers can be pretty nasty, while Blam pointed out—with NSFW photographic evidence—that meat grinders are the surliest of the bunch.

The country's two most famous robotics authors enlightened us on future encounters with our robot overlords: PW Singer, author of Wired For War, walked us through exactly why Asimov's laws of robotics are so full of crap they'll never protect humans from cybernetic violence, though he later explained why the likelihood of a true Terminator-style takeover is slim.

Meanwhile, Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, showed us why two-legged humanoid robots would soon do our bidding on the battlefield.

The guest appearances continued, with MythBusters' Adam Savage dropping in to blow our minds about the fine art of electrocution, and why you probably shouldn't try it at home.

You all got in the game, voting on which robots were the most deadly in the humanoid and heavyweight divisions, and how the winner of each—Caprica 6 and Gort-would fare in a Battle Royale. 6 won, but since she received 756,000 votes, we're assuming foul play.

Naturally, we also stuck in the age-old question of a bout between Wall-E and Johnny 5, though Sean saved the scariest robots for last, in his TGIF roundup.

It was a good week, though somehow there was no comfort in learning that ordinary dumb gadgets are as deadly as—or deadlier than—robots trained to kill you. Especially when, at present, a 17-year-old Candian girl is our best bet in the war against the machines. [Machines Behaving Deadly]

Yeah, it's kind of like pitting a puppy vs a toddler...but I digress.

This tournament poll of the world's deadliest robots was proposed to us by our friend PW Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century which we covered last March. Stay tuned for more scary-ass robots wreaking havoc on fleshy humans and metallic adversaries alike.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

SimMan 3G: Intended as an instructional aid for aspiring doctors, SimMan can reproduce human reactions like crying, bleeding, convulsions, and even cardiac arrest. And, as you can see, his intense creepiness is sure to eliminate any students that might not be able to cope. [Link]

Cabbage Patch Spider-Bot: This DIY spider-bot takes the inherently creepy Cabbage Patch Kid and intensifies it a million-fold. [Make via Link]

Gakutensoku: Designed 80 years ago for Emperor Showa (aka Hirohito), this robot was recently restored with a $200,000 computer-controlled pneumatic servo system. It can tilt its head, blink, smile and puff up its chest and cheeks with a system of inflatable rubber tubes. Check out that evil grin at about the 1:40 mark (*shudder*). [Link]

Lucy: Steve Grand's infamous "Lucy" orangutan robot was an attempt at simulating the mind of a human baby.What he managed to create is an affront to all things good and holy. [Link Image via Streeb-Greebling]

Saya: Humanoid robots interacting with children is just plain creepy—and Saya here isn't helping much with her appearance. Using 18 motors and some complex programming, Saya can express emotions, speak several different languages, take roll-call and assign tasks to her elementary school students. [Link]

Yume Neko Smile: Intended to provide all of the benefits of owning a real cat without all of the drawbacks of taking care of a living, breathing creature, Yume Neko Smile adds the character-building element of terror that children so desperately need these days. [Link]

Simroid: Like the SimMan, Simroid is designed as a learning aid—although the objective here is to train dentists. It reacts like a human would in most situations—except when sexually abused. Dentists trying that in the real world are often met with swift and severe punishment. [Link]

WD-2: This shape-shifting robot can quickly change faces using an array of servos and microcontrollers. It's only a matter of time before these things infiltrate human society, becoming whoever they want, whenever they want. [Link]

Geminoid: Designed as a realistic, robotic doppelganger for Hiroshi Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University, the Geminoid can be remote controlled from anywhere—allowing the professor to, essentially, be in two places at once. [Wired]

CB2: Quite possibly the creepiest robot on this list, Child Robot with Biomimetic Body (CB2) uses complex computers, 197 sensors, eye-cameras and 51 pneumatic "muscles" to learn like a human child. It taught itself to recognize facial expressions, follow the gaze of it's "mother" and even walk and talk. That's pretty impressive, but after looking at this video it becomes clear that the only course of action is to take it out back with a shotgun before it learns to kill. [Link]

Being on death row is lonely, so having a TV is important to your sanity. Godwin's was on the fritz, so he decided to multitask by trying to fix it while using the commode.

The last stupid decision of his life was to bite down on an exposed wire in the plugged-in TV while sitting on the metal toilet. He was electrocuted instantly, making his own kind of electric chair and saving the state the trouble.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

Stay tuned later today for a special bonus round between two loveable robots completely unsuited for combat. The question of the century will finally be answered.

This tournament poll of the world's deadliest robots was proposed to us by our friend PW Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century which we covered last March. Stay tuned for more of the tournament, more from Singer, and for more scary-ass robots wreaking havoc on fleshy humans and metallic adversaries alike.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

Think about it: It's a formula designed to let a machine essentially wriggle around inside your head to extract your true intentions—intentions you might not even realize you have yet—to reveal them to the company bean counters, who are basically machines themselves. Who can then take the Pre-Crime approach and shitcan you before you quit—if you were really going to quit at all.

Google developed the algorithm in response to its best employees bailing, so presumably at least some of the unhappy people would be wooed, not written off. But this is just the beginning. Today, a computer knows if you're going to quit. Next, a computer calculates if you should be hired at all. Which is only a few generations removed from determining if all people shouldn't be fired, but like, permanently. From earth.

The uprising is coming, and Google will be where it begins. [WSJ]

There are more detailed shots below, in the gallery, but do not blame me if you vomit.

From Wikipedia:

A meat grinder or meat mincer is a kitchen appliance for grinding, fine mincing or mixing raw or cooked meat, fish, vegetables or similar food. It replaces tools like the mincing knife, for example, which has been used to produce minced meat, filling etc. The producer puts the minced food into a funnel, which is placed on the top of the grinder. From there the material goes on a horizontal screw conveyor. This screw conveyor, that can be powered by a hand wheel or an electric motor, squashes and partially mixes the food. At the end of the screw conveyor there is a knife installed directly in front of the fixed hole plate. At this opening the minced meat comes out of the machine. The fineness of the meat depends on the size of the holes of the plate.

Four out of Five Gizmodo editors didn't have the stomach to post this. I can't say I blame them.

[where else?]

Keep in mind that the final showdown between the winner of the Humanoid Class and the Heavyweight Class will go down tomorrow, so make sure to cast your votes for the matchup you would like to see most.

This tournament poll of the world's deadliest robots was proposed to us by our friend PW Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century which we covered last March. Stay tuned for more of the tournament, more from Singer, and for more scary-ass robots wreaking havoc on fleshy humans and metallic adversaries alike.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

So, what are the preconditions, according to Singer?

1. The AI or robot has to have some sense of self-preservation and ambition, to want power or fear the loss of power.

2. The robots have to have eliminated any dependence on humans.

3. Humans have to have omitted failsafe controls, so there's no ability to turn robots or AI off.

4. The robots need to gain these advantages in a way that takes humans by surprise.

At the moment, says Singer, these conditions do not exist. "In the Terminator movies, Skynet gets super intelligence, figures the humans are going to eventually shut it down, thinks, 'I better strike first.'" However, in today's army, "we're building robots specifically to go off and get killed." He adds, "No one is building them to have a survival instinct—they're actually building them to have the exact opposite."

As far as human dependence, robots may do more and more human dirty work, but robots still need the meatbags to handle their dirty laundry. "The Global Hawk drone may be able to take off on its own, fly on its own, but it still needs someone to put that gasoline in there." Still, it's not hard to see how this precondition could eventually be overcome.

The failsafe discussion is surprisingly two sided. "It seems rather odd that people who grew up watching Terminator in the movie theaters wouldn't think, 'Hmm, maybe we should have a turn-off switch on there.'" But on the other hand, "brilliant AI could just figure a way around it." Besides, "we don't want to make the failsafe all that easy, because we don't want a robot that comes up to Bin Laden that he can just shut off by reaching around the back and hitting the switch."

We of course assume that robots will never gain the element of surprise. "You don't get super-intelligent robots without first having semi-super-intelligent robots, and so on. At each one of these stages, someone would push back." The scary thing is, Singer does acknowledge that the exponential growth of super-smart machines may indeed catch us by surprise eventually. "By the end it's happening too quickly for people to see."

No matter what preconditions are prevented deliberately, there is a point on every futurist's timeline where computers become "smarter" than humans, in terms of sheer brain capability, and no matter what happens up till that point, the game then changes completely. "In the Terminator movies, Skynet both tricks and coerces people into doing its bidding." How do we stop that from happening?

"Some people say, 'Let's just not work on these systems. If they're so many things coming out of this that are potentially dangerous, why don't we just stop?'" says Singer. "We could do that, as long as we also stop war, capitalism and the human instinct for science and invention." [More from my interview with PW Singer]

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

On one hand, kittens are organic lifeforms, presumably loyal to other organic lifeforms. On the other, kittens grow into cats. And for thousands of years, cats have refused to follow the human code.

What I postulate is a future in which there is a sort of war trifecta. It will be Man vs. Machine vs. Kittens. And with the feline world showing up as an insane wild card, anything can happen...though in the immortal words of John Connor, the outcome is most likely that, "We are dead!! We are all dead!! Because of kittens!!!" [Cute Overload]

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

Julia Dales, a 17 year old from Canada, won the wild card auditions and has a chance to compete in the World Beatbox Championships that take place on May 28th. She's kind of cool. Wouldn't you like to have a little sister like that who could throw down a soundtrack on every family road trip?

The ball shot out at 70MPH, striking Anderson in the skull. He wasn't knocked completely unconscious and was surprised to discover his head swelling in instead of out. This was because he had multiple skull fractures that were causing blood to collect in his brain. Bad news.

Surgeons had to relieve the pressure in his skull to keep blood from entering more parts of his brain. Because seven areas of his brain had collapsed, there was a fear that permanent brain damage could result.

Now, 7 years later, Mitchell is one of the top players on his high school baseball team, batting a .455 with a .714 on-base percentage.

An impressive recovery and comeback to be sure, but he's got to know that somewhere out there is a pitching machine that wants to finish the job. Watch your back, Anderson. [News Journal Online]

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

Caprica 6 vs The Gunslinger and a group of Fembots:

Stay tuned for the final round of the Heavyweight Division later today. Keep in mind that the final showdown between the winner of the Humanoid Class and the Heavyweight Class will go down tomorrow, so make sure to cast your votes for the matchup you would like to see most.

This tournament poll of the world's deadliest robots was proposed to us by our friend PW Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century which we covered last March. Stay tuned for more of the tournament, more from Singer, and for more scary-ass robots wreaking havoc on fleshy humans and metallic adversaries alike.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

Oh yes...it's Mega Maid from Spaceballs.

Stay tuned for the fourth and final rounds of the Heavyweight and Humanoid class battles later today. The winners of these final division battles will be pitted against one another in a winner-take-all, inter-divisional robo-superfight on Friday. Cast your votes and feel free to suggest a new opponent in the comments.

This tournament poll of the world's deadliest robots was proposed to us by our friend PW Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century which we covered last March. Stay tuned for more of the tournament, more from Singer, and for more scary-ass robots wreaking havoc on fleshy humans and metallic adversaries alike.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

Both the Humanoid and Heavyweight Battles will continue tomorrow. Cast your vote and feel free to suggest a new opponent in the comments.

This tournament poll of the world's deadliest robots was proposed to us by our friend PW Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century which we covered last March. Stay tuned for more of the tournament, more from Singer, and for more scary-ass robots wreaking havoc on fleshy humans and metallic adversaries alike.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

A humanoid robot is a general-purpose robot that looks a lot like a person, complete with a head, torso, arms and legs. The "total package" humanoid can walk bipedally, like a person, and use its hands to dexterously manipulate objects in the world.

Current prototypes like the Honda ASIMO can deliver tea and politely shake hands with their human masters, but based on some great sci-fi movies, humanoid robots are supposed to be terrors on the battlefield—walking titanium endoskeletons crunching over human skulls and mowing down pesky humans with massive handheld Gatling guns.

Will we ever really see a humanoid robot army? I think so, and here are my top five reasons why.

1. There is a one-to-one mapping between the human and the humanoid body.
Robots aren't yet smart enough to play without supervision. That's why human soldiers control unmanned aerial vehicles from thousands of miles away by twiddling joysticks. It isn't easy, but flying a plane through empty space is child's play compared to maneuvering a ground-based robot through rubble and wreckage. And what if you need to do something more complicated than just stepping over a curb, like defusing a bomb?

It's called telepresence. With telepresence, a person feels as though they are the robot by controlling the robot's body and seeing through its eyes. Human-shaped robots are infinitely easier to manipulate because there is a one-to-one mapping between man and machine. Instead of shoving around a non-intuitive joystick, slide your hands into gloves that map your fingers to robot fingers thousands of miles away. Now put your human expertise to work, without putting your human butt in danger.

2. Humanoid robots take advantage of human environments and equipment.
Nothing beats a tank for crossing the desert, but what about crossing a living room? Every human city is designed for a very specific type of animal: homo sapiens. We humans come in a very specific range of sizes and weights, and our environments tend to have specific temperature, vibration and noise limits—all of which simplify the problem of designing a robot. Humanoids are naturally suited to navigating environments designed for humans; they can walk through doorways, climb steps, and see over counters and furniture.

Along with our cities, most military supplies are designed for use by humans. That means a humanoid robot can wear human body armor, boots and camouflage. In addition, it can fire standard-issue weapons and ammunition, removing a need for specially-designed weaponry. Humanoids could also potentially pilot human vehicles. Rather than creating an autonomous vehicle from scratch, just put a humanoid robot in the driver's seat of a standard vehicle. And when a robot squad is on the go and under fire, it always helps to be able to scavenge enemy weapons and improvise. The infrastructure is there, and humanoid robots exploit it.

3. Humanoid robots are easier to train.
War is largely improvised, and that means learning new tricks on the fly. So, how do you teach a robot comrade how to defuse a new type of coffee-can landmine? Without a degree in engineering, you probably don't. But given a humanoid robot, intuitive training approaches are available to regular soldiers. An easy but tedious method is to physically push the robot's limbs through the proper series of movements. Alternately, take direct control through teleoperation and then perform the activity yourself. The robot then just needs to remember how you did it.

Ideally, however, a robot can be trained just like a person—by watching. Robots who learn by demonstration can be quickly trained by ordinary people who do not speak robot-ese or do any programming. That's because it's how we learn from each other. The trainer simply performs the task (e.g., a flying scissor kick) and the robot watches and intuits how to do it. Humanoids are much better at learning by demonstration, thanks to that one-to-one mapping between its body and yours.

4. Teamwork is easier between humans and humanoids.
It is doubtful that robot armies will operate completely autonomously in the near future. Human-robot teams will likely be the norm, as they are today. Therefore, it's important to make sure that human and robot allies can work together without stepping on each others' toes. And that means they've got to have good communication.

Human combat teams communicate and cooperate using language and gestures, and by paying attention to each other's facial expressions and emotions. Robot warriors that recognize human body language will be able to make fast decisions in loud, hazardous environments. Perhaps even more important, a human soldier should be able to understand what a robot is thinking naturally, by reading its body language instead of looking up an error code in an instruction manual. Using the highly familiar human form-factor creates a natural communication channel that allows humanoids to cooperate with humans in chaotic environments where split-second decisions are the norm.

5. The locals could potentially interact with humanoid robots.
War is becoming less about conventional fighting on a mass scale and more about cultural awareness. Last month, President Obama unveiled plans to send hundreds of "social scientists" along with soldiers to Iraq, to counsel the military on local customs. Relative to the faceless robots currently in use, a humanoid robot provides the opportunity for some kind of natural human interaction with non-combatants. Instead of an impersonal unmanned ground vehicle wrecking through walls or an unmanned aerial vehicle dropping bombs from afar, humanoid robots (armed or unarmed) could patrol areas wearing local garb, speaking the local language, and obeying local customs. How P.C.—or just freaky—is that?

On the other hand, humanoid robots can be horribly terrifying.
Mind games are a part of every battle. During World War II, aviators painted snarling teeth on the noses of their fighter planes. Nowadays (and back then), bombs have funny messages written on them, like "Boom shacka lacka," and "You want fries with that?"

Now imagine the enemy reaction on Robot D-Day, when thousands of super-powered humanoid robots march out of the crashing surf, bullets plinking harmlessly from their razor-sharp gilded breast-plates as death metal blares from their metal mouth speaker grilles.

Terrified yet? Well calm down, sissy; humanoid robots aren't on the battlefield, yet. But they might be soon, thanks to their natural ability to communicate and cooperate with humans, the ease with which they can operate in our environments and use our tools, and the terrible fear that blossoms in the heart of man upon laying eyes on the great and horrifying visage of the humanoid robot war machine.

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology. Guest writer Daniel H. Wilson earned a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising and its sequel How To Build a Robot Army. To learn more about him, visit www.danielhwilson.com.

If you learned about how electrocution kills you from cartoons or Ernest P. Worrell—you get fried as your body flashes like fireworks and everybody can see your bones—well, you got learned wrong. Electricity doesn't actually fry you—that actually requires way more juice than it takes to kill you, which is a frighteningly minuscule amount.

But before we get to the scary part, let's get through the technical part, so we're on all the same page of scariness. You've got a few major units when it comes to electricity: Volts relate voltage, amperes (amps) describe the current, watts measure power and ohms refer to resistance. A pretty good analogy from HowStuffWorks relates the basic differences between them, plumbing style: Voltage is like water pressure, current (amps) is like the flow rate, and resistance (ohms) is like the size of the pipe. Increasing the voltage results in a greater current (more amps)—assuming a constant resistance-since increasing the pressure logically increases flow [Update: Clarified this sentence]. Power (wattage) is simply the voltage multiplied by the current (amps). One amp is equal to about 6.242 × 10^18 electrons per second moving through a point. And a single watt is equivalent to one joule of energy per second, but that doesn't matter so much for our purposes.

Alright, now let's get real. And who's more real and had more opportunity to get electrocuted than Adam Savage from MythBusters? So we called and asked him just how much electricity you need to kill a human. His reply? "I'm about to freak you out."

Seven milliamps. For three seconds. That's all it takes. Electricity kills you by interrupting your heart rhythm. If 7 milliamps reaches your heart continuously for three seconds, "your heart goes arrhythmic," he explained. Then everything else starts shutting down. "You could quite easily kill someone with a 9-volt or AAA battery directly to the heart."

The reason electricity isn't able to murder millions of people a day with ultra-tiny shocks is that our bodies have built-in resistance against electricity, so it doesn't shoot straight to our heart. The skin's resistance is about 5,000 to 15,000 ohms. Adam said that "it's super difficult to quantify" precisely how much juice you need to break through, since there's all kinds of variables in play, like the clothes you're wearing. Not to mention, "how do you quantify that someone's actually died?"

But if it's any consolation, Adam says that the kind of static shock that actually stings your skin is about 20,000 volts—high voltage, just a really tiny amperage.

So the trick is getting the proper amount of power to cut through our skin and clothes and rubber-soled shoes to zap our heart. There's a reliable way to do that: Lightning. With lightning, Adam said, "all bets are off." A lightning bolt can hit over a billion volts. Air's resistance, he explained, is about 10,000 volts per centimeter—so for electricity to move just 10cm through air requires 100,000 volts.

Machines could generate lightning artificially—this dude Charles Steinmetz built a lightning machine back in 1916 that generated over 10,000 amps and 100,000 volts. The reason some people survive is that they luck out with the path it takes through their body—so they might get scorched if it travels along the outside of their body, like if you're wet, but if their heart goes untouched, they could come out alive.

That's obviously wildly impractical—the sophistication and energy required for lightning-shooting machines would be more easily put toward acquiring nukes, a la every apocalyptic movie ever. Besides, there are far simpler machines that do a similar job when it comes to electrocuting people. Simple skin-penetrating Tasers already kill people occasionally. However, according to Adam, Tasers are designed with the 3-second-kill problem in mind—most pulse at much shorter intervals to avoid being fatal.

Still, we likely have little to fear from extinction by electrocution. With the exception of the admittedly clumsy electric chair, no one's ever systematically killed people with electricity. Machines, if they were to develop a murderous intent, would most likely use all of the other ways humans have designed to kill each other.

Huge thanks to Adam Savage from MythBusters for helping us—or the machines?—out!

Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about why I'll never recover from Terminator: Salvation, electrifying puns or the pancake apocalypse to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.