Anyone who’s seen a science fiction movie knows that robots can be dangerous, especially the robots who appear the most human. While that’s a handy literary device, it kind of gets to the heart of a major philosophical issue in technology: can we control that which we create?

We thought about the other day when we came across this video of some experiments conducted by German scientists who were trying to see if a knife-wielding robot could be made to stop it’s stabbing or slashing or slicing before the knife cut into human flesh. An especially gripping part of the video is where research Sami Haddadin offers up his own arm to a knife-wielding robot, confident that the robot won’t cut him.

On today’s show, we talk to Sami about the experiment and how his team is trying to make robots more human so they’ll be less likely to stab actual humans.