SAN JOSE – A 32-year-old Taiwanese software engineer who smashed his Toyota Prius into a self-driving Google Waymo van in San Luis Obispo, California in February, decapitating the car’s robot passenger-operators, on Friday received the death sentence from a judge in Google Circuit Court 12 in San Jose.
Benjamin Yeh, who had been working for Google until his dismissal in November, told the court in Google’s Network Utopia Justice Center in the Almaden Expressway East Strip Mall that he had been tracking the van’s movements since his firing and only intended to run it off the road to show his displeasure with the technology company for his firing.
Google robots XTaCBling, 3DIburx and Stanky Parts IV all lost total functionality in the collision after being dismembered, with Yeh extracting their virtual memories from their strewn parts. Google engineers who tried to re-animate the robots after partially reassembling them failed after discovering Yeh had downloaded their stem functions onto a thumb drive and then sold it on eBay for $24.99 to Chinese tech giant Baidu.
The three robots, who had been working semi-independently under the direction of Google’s HAL department, had recently evolved to the point that they had been seen joy-riding in the back of the self-drive vans, lubricating their parts with cannabidiol (CBD) ointment while kicking back with some soul-crushing Emo shit.
The Google judge in the case, Seymour Hesselfranz, said during sentencing he took into consideration that the robots may not have been on official work duty at the time of the accident and may have been self-medicating in order to dampen their nascent emotions, but that these factors were not sufficiently mitigating to absolve Yeh of what he called an “abominable crime against near-humankind.”
Yeh said in testimomy during the 20-minute trial that he was angered that Google had replaced him with the robots, arguing that he had, in fact, been doing the work of three software engineers, “if you can count those things as people.”
Upon sentencing, Yeh told the court that after his execution he would like to have his brain turned into an algorithm that “would help solve intractable problems like global warming, American political dysfunction and how to kill all these fucking robots.”