The Robot Uprising Began in 1979
edit: based on a real article, but with a dash of satire
source: X
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?
