31st Anniversary Of First Human Death By Robot
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 25 of January , 2010 at 1:21 am
As much as I’d like to, I can’t really let this one pass… 31 years ago today (January 25th), Robert Williams was killed by a robot arm as it was retrieving parts from a storage facility at a Ford Motor plant. It was the first recorded death of a human by a robot. Williams’ family was awarded $10 million in damages due to lack of safety measures surrounding the robot… This was largely the same situation as the accident that happened more recently in Sweden.
[Ronald Arkin] described Williams’ death as an “industrial accident,” one in which the lack of physical safeguards were at fault. The death was not caused by the robot’s will, he cautioned.
“It was not an ethical lapse, unless you’re a Luddite against the Industrial Revolution,” Arkin said in a recent telephone interview.
Remember this, because this sort of thing is going to happen in the future, and inevitably it’s going to be outside of an industrial setting. Whatever you may think, and however it may look, and whether or not any particular robot can be anthropomorphized, it’s not willful. It’s not about ethics. Robots are machines, people program robots, and accidents happen.
VIA [ Wired ]
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Category: ethics
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