On January 25, 1979, Robert Williams became the first person (on record at least) to be killed by a robot, but it was far from the last fatality at the hands of a robotic system.
Williams was a 25-year-old employee at the Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. On that infamous day, he was working with a parts-retrieval system that moved castings and other materials from one part of the factory to another.
The robot identified the employee as in its way and, thus, a threat to its mission, and calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to remove the worker with extreme prejudice.
“Using its very powerful hydraulic arm, the robot smashed the surprised worker into the operating machine, killing him instantly, after which it resumed its duties without further interference.”
A news report about the legal battle suggests the killer robot continued working while Williams lay dead for 30 minutes until fellow workers realized what had happened.
Many more deaths of this ilk have continued to pile up. A 2023 study identified that robots have killed at least 41 people in the USA between 1992 and 2017, with almost half of the fatalities in the Midwest, a region bursting with heavy industry and manufacturing.
For now, the companies that own these murderbots are held responsible for their actions. However, as AI grows increasingly ubiquitous and potentially uncontrollable, how might robot murders become ever-more complicated, and whom will we hold responsible as their decision-making becomes more self-driven and opaque?
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Okay, I’ve worked in industrial robotics for about a decade - a huge portion of that time being working with safety systems - and this story just did not look true to me, so I looked into it.
“The robot identified the employee as in its way and, thus, a threat to its mission, and calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to remove the worker with extreme prejudice.”?
Come off it.
Robert Williams was working with the parts retrieval system, yes. The system was 5-storey shelving, where a robot mounted on a cart would move in and retrieve the parts and take them off to other stations. The robot+cart weighed at least one ton.
The system was either giving wrong results about the inventory level in the shelves, or wasn’t picking anywhere near fast enough (reports are unclear) so:
Robert Williams was asked to climb up to get them himself. While he was doing this extremely unsafe activity (of CLIMBING THE SHELVES WHERE THE INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY WAS WORKING), the system was not switched off. Jesus Fucking Christ.
While he was up there, the robot, which to reiterate, was still switched on, was continuing its work without any input that a worker was in the operating area. It went in to retrieve the parts, and its pre-programmed path intersected with Robert’s head, and killed him instantly. It is true that he was not found for 30 minutes until his colleagues came looking for him.
Williams’ family successfully sued the robot manufacturers for $10,000,000 for not having installed sufficient safety systems.
Today, in any industrial facility where robots are working, we spend huge amounts of time and money ensuring these incidents (I’m not calling it an accident, because accidents imply there’s no one to blame. Whoever sent him up there, and didn’t shut the system down is to blame) do not occur.
We have 2 meter high fencing around everywhere a robot possibly moves in its work. We have “lightguards”; laser systems across anywhere the fencing has to have gaps, that kill the power to the entire system if they are tripped. We have emergency stop buttons on literally every piece of equipment. You can’t even open a door without stopping everything. Hard hats, eye protection, and high-vis vests are mandatory for anyone even walking through the footpaths on the factory floor.
This is not a story of murderbots deciding humans are in their way and killing them without mercy to get the job done. It’s so easy to ascribe that level of decision-making to something that moves on it’s own, but it’s completely incorrect. It was a machine working exactly as it was supposed to, without any feedback that anything was wrong.
This is a story of a flagrant disregard of worker’s safety around industrial machinery.
The safety regulations that mandate the precautions we use today are written in Robert Williams blood.
the initial description is just so fucking laughably wrong, though.
the robot didn’t detect him and decide to eliminate him.
it didn’t detect him, because it had no mechanism for detecting things. this is 1979! it didn’t have cameras and AI and shit. it had programming that told it how to move to get from one point to another, so it did so. it didn’t detect threats, it didn’t detect anything, it just moved from one point to another at full speed and he was soft and in the way.
but also, yeah, the regulations and safeguards are a good idea and we should in fact have them. but the problem was never anything like a robot deciding that a person was a threat to its mission.
if you drop a brick from a tall building, and it kills someone, it wasn’t because the brick was trying to go down and it identified the person as being in its way. it just fucking fell.
the robot didn’t
detect him and decide to
eliminate him.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Health & Safety regulation is written in blood using shards of crushed bones instead of pens
Literally anyone who supports the idea of decreasing the funding of, or gutting regulations and agencies like OSHA is knowingly supporting killing people to save some money
ALT