This day in history: Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford Motor Company plant, became the first person known to be killed by a robot when a factory robot's arm struck him in the head.
"Williams died instantly in 1979 when the robot's arm slammed him as he was gathering parts in a storage facility, where the robot also retrieved parts. Williams' family was later awarded $10 million in damages. The jury agreed the robot struck him in the head because of a lack of safety measures, including one that would sound an alarm if the robot was near." Source
In 1981, Kenji Urada became Japan’s first person killed by a robot. "Urada was doing some maintenance and repair work on a robot. There was a wire mesh fence surrounding the robot which when unhooked, could have shut down the power. But Kenji went over the safety fence without unhooking it and accidentally turned the robot on. Kenji was trapped by the robot’s hydraulic arm which pinned him against another machine for cutting gears. He was crushed by the robot while other facility workers could not help because they did not know how to operate the machine to stop it." Source
Wanda Holbrook, who was employed as a journeyman maintenance technician at Ventra Ionia LLC in Ionia, Michigan was crushed and killed by a robot while maintaining equipment in 2015.
On March 18, 2018, Elaine Herzberg became the first person killed by a self-driving car. The self-driving Uber car that hit and killed Herzberg did not recognize that people sometimes jaywalk. Herzberg's family settled with Uber out of court. Uber announced that it had relaunched its self-driving cars nine months after the incident.
"Journalist and conspiracy theorist Linda Moulton Howe addressed a crowd at the Conscious Life Expo in Los Angeles in December 2018. Part of her speech has since gone viral on the Internet. Howe says in her talk that, in August 2017, four AI robots killed 29 scientists at a lab in Japan. While many are using this claim to argue about the dangers of artificial intelligence, others don’t think this story is true. Well, Howe’s points may be valid, but the incident in Japan she refers to is not verifiable." Source
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