TIL The first recorded human death by robot was in 1979 when 25-year-old Ford Motor assembly line worker Robert William was struck by an arm of a malfunctioning one-ton robot
TIL The first recorded human death by robot was in 1979 when 25-year-old Ford Motor assembly line worker Robert William was struck by an arm of a malfunctioning one-ton robot
Robert Nicholas Williams was an American factory worker who was the first known human to be killed by a robot. While working at the Ford Motor Company's Michigan Casting Center, Williams was killed by an industrial robot arm on January 25, 1979.
Williams was one of three operators of the parts retrieval system, a five-story robot built by the Unit Handling Systems division of Litton Industries. The robot was designed to retrieve castings from high density storage shelves at the Flat Rock plant. Part of the machine included one-ton transfer vehicles, which were carts on rubber wheels equipped with mechanical arms to move castings to and from the shelves. When the robot gave erroneous inventory readings, Williams was asked to climb into the racks to retrieve parts manually. Another news account states the robot was not retrieving parts quickly enough.
He climbed into the third level of the storage rack, where he was struck from behind and crushed by one of the one-ton transfer vehicles, killing him instantly. His body remained in the shelf for 30 minutes until it was discovered by workers who were concerned about his disappearance.
His family sued the manufacturers of the robot, Litton Industries, alleging "that Litton was negligent in designing, manufacturing and supplying the storage system and in failing to warn [system operators] of foreseeable dangers in working within the storage area." In a 1983 jury decision, the court awarded his estate $10 million and concluded that there simply were not enough safety measures in place to prevent such an accident from happening. He would go down in history as the first recorded human death by robot. The award was raised to $15 million in January 1984. Litton settled with the estate of Williams for an undisclosed amount in exchange for Litton not admitting negligence.
If you ever work on a modern industrial system then you'll see all kinds of rules, safety measures and more fun
It often makes small jobs extremely tedious, but I always remind myself it's because the robot arm I'm looking at is strong enough to throw me across the room or crush my bones.
Movies underestimate how a robot could kill a human with a single punch.
Terminator didn't need firearms, it could just single punch everyone to death. Kind of crazy string chimps are but bigger, stronger and made of metal.
For me it's the acceleration and speed they don't comprehend.even "safe" collaborative robots can accelerate to huge speeds in the blink of an eye, and being electric they'll do it at maximum force
I've driven one into my head before and its remarkable how soft it was thanks to the tech involved but movies miss the fact that if it wanted, even a small arm could have gone through me
There is a steel mill (recycling plant) in my town. They give tours every Friday. I have been 3 times, twice with teams of (software) engineers.
If you want to go see what engineering means when lives are on the line, tour a steel mill. Fucking amazing.
Half of those rules are written in blood
Clearly this means war
I'm going to guess that humans have killed far more robots. So the robots have some catch up to do.
Never forget
Why is this article linked to site that just rips-off Wikipedia articles? Just post the original Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Williams_(robot_fatality)
Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics would have prevented this.
First Law:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law:
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law:
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
How would that prevent a malfunction from accidentally killing someone?