Robots Are Already Killing People
The robot revolution began long ago, and so did the killing. One day in 1979, a robot at a Ford Motor Company casting plant malfunctioned—human workers determined that it was not going fast enough. And so 25-year-old Robert Williams was asked to climb into a storage rack to help move things along. The one-ton robot continued to work silently, smashing into Williams’s head and instantly killing him. This was reportedly the first incident in which a robot killed a human; many more would follow.
At Kawasaki Heavy Industries in 1981, Kenji Urada died in similar . A malfunctioning robot he went to inspect killed him when he obstructed its path, according to Gabriel Hallevy in his 2013. As Hallevy puts it, the robot simply determined that “the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to push the worker into an adjacent machine.” From 1992 to 2017, workplace robots were responsible for —and that’s likely an , especially when you consider knock-on effects from automation, such as job loss. A robotic anti-aircraft cannon nine South African soldiers in 2007 when a possible software failure led the machine to swing itself wildly and fire dozens of lethal rounds in less than a second. In a 2018 trial, a medical robot was implicated in killing during a routine operation that had occurred a few years earlier.
