Featured Image Credit: Joe Clark/EPA/US National Archives and Records Administration /Bettmann/Contributor/Getty
45 years ago, Robert Williams became the first person in history to be killed by a robot, but he certainly wasn't the last. This is the terrifying story behind his death.
Williams, 25, was an employee at the Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan.
On January 25 1979, he was working with two other men on a robotic transfer vehicle that moved materials from one part of the factory to another.
When the robot began running slowly, Williams reportedly climbed into the third story of the storage rack to retrieve parts manually.
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Unfortunately, he was struck in the head by the mechanical arm of the one-ton robot and died instantly.
It is believed that the robotic system had misidentified him as an inanimate object that needed to be moved from the storage unit.
According to a news report at the time, the robot continued operating for about 30 minutes while the man lay dead.
His body was discovered a short while later when his co-workers became concerned because he was missing.
Williams' family later sued Litton Industries, who'd manufactured the machine that killed him for failing to provide sufficient safety devices in areas where the robotic arm moved with considerable force.
Following his death, one of the family's lawyers, Joan Lovell, told the Ottawa Citizen: "If they didn't want people up there when the robot was moving around, they should have installed safety devices.
"Human beings are more important than production."
In a 1983 jury decision, they were awarded $10 million in compensation - the biggest personal injury payout in state history at the time. This was later raised to $15 million in 1984.
Another of the family's lawyers, Paul Rosen, said: ''I think we have to be very careful that we don't go backward to the kind of notions we had during the Industrial Revolution that people are expendable.''
Tragically, Robert Williams is not the only person to be killed at the hands of a robot.
A 2023 study found that at least 41 robot-related fatalities had occurred in the US between 1992 and 2017. The majority of these deaths happened in the Midwest, which is known for its manufacturing industry.
With both robots and artificial intelligence rapidly becoming both more advanced and more widely used, it raises a moral conundrum.
When a robot kills somebody, who do we hold responsible for their death? Is it the robot itself or the human beings that created it?
