First death at the hands of a robot happened in 1979, then again in 1981
Robotic arm
In today's world, when artificial intelligence and robots are threatening to take over, humans are not ready to give in. Technology continues to grow, with robots taking over the roles of servants, masseuses, even partners and more. People are scared that the machines might soon start attacking them.
However, this would not be the first time a robot would threaten man. The first time a robot killed a man was over 45 years back in 1979, as per a report in IFLScience.
Robert Williams was the first person to be killed by a robot, as per records. The incident happened in the US.
The 25-year-old worked at the Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. According to legal documents, on the day of the incident, he was working with a parts-retrieval system which moved certain materials from one part of the factory to another.
The machinewasn't working optimally, so he suspected that a malfunction had occurred. Williams climbed into the third-story of a shelving unit to check what was wrong. This was when a mechanical arm “struck from behind and crushed” him.
Reports suggest that the machine continued to work for another 30 minutes before Williams was discovered by fellow workers.
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The robotic system, reportedly, considered Williams an inanimate object and so moved him from the storage unit.
His family sued the manufacturer of the machine, Litton Industries, in 1983 for the terrible accident. They argued that despite the robotic arm moving with considerable force, no sufficient safety devices were installed.
Also Read:Technology devouring humans? Robot crushes man to death in South Korea
They were awarded $10 million in compensation, which was increased to $15 million in 1984.
Robots killed 2 men in Japan and South Korea
A similar incident unfolded in Japan two years later, in 1981, when Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old worker at the Kawasaki Heavy Industries plant in Akashi, was killed by a mechanical arm. He was also inspecting a malfunctioning robot.
Just last year, a robot crushed a man to death in South Korea as it was not able to differentiate between him and the food boxes. The robotic arm took the man for a box of vegetables and grabbed him mistakenly. It pushed him over the conveyor belt, where his face and chest were crushed by the machine, stated South Korean news agency Yonhap.
