Robert Williams was the first person in history to die from a robot accident at a Ford factory on January 25, 1979.
Williams was a 25-year-old worker at the Ford Motor Company’s casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. On January 25, 1979, he was working alongside a parts collection system that transferred cast products from one end of the factory to the other. Suspecting a malfunction as the machine operated slowly, Williams jumped up to the third tier of a storage rack, where he was struck from behind by a robotic arm and crushed.
Ford Casting Plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. (Photo: Joe Clark).
A report from legal records indicated that the robot continued to function while Williams was fatally injured until his colleagues discovered what had happened 30 minutes later. The accident occurred because the robotic system mistook the worker for an inanimate object that needed to be removed from storage.
In 1983, Williams’ family successfully sued the machine’s manufacturer, Litton Industries, on the grounds of insufficient safety equipment installed in areas where the robotic arm moved with significant force. They received $10 million in compensation. After a prolonged legal battle, the payout increased to $15 million in 1984.
This period marked the beginning of industries integrating more automation and robotic systems into factory lines, leading to a series of new threats to workplace safety. Just two years after Williams’ death, a similar accident occurred in Japan. In 1981, Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old worker at Kawasaki Heavy Industries’ plant in Akashi, died when a robotic arm malfunctioned while he was inspecting it. He accidentally activated the robot after jumping over a safety fence made of wire mesh in the factory.
In the book When Robots Kill: Artificial Intelligence Under Criminal Law, Gabriel Hallevy, an Israeli criminal law professor, explains that robots perceive workers as threats to their tasks and calculate the most effective way to eliminate that threat by pushing the worker into an adjacent machine. Using a powerful hydraulic arm, the robot violently slammed the victim into the operating machine, causing instant death, and then continued its operations without interruption.
Several similar fatalities have been recorded in the following decades. A study in 2023 confirmed at least 41 robot-related deaths in the U.S. from 1992 to 2017, with nearly half of the incidents occurring in the Midwest, an area associated with manufacturing and heavy industry. This raises numerous ethical and legal questions that have become increasingly complex in today’s evolving world of artificial intelligence (AI). Most scholars argue that humans must bear ethical responsibility for the machines and AI systems they create.
