In many factories utilizing robots, there are sure “kill” or “danger” zones where people are not allowed to enter.
In the United States, about one person falls victim to an industrial robot yearly, and the Department of Labor maintains a record of such incidents.
In 2021 alone, there were two instances: one at Ford Motor Company and another at Columbia Okura.
In each case, an employee was entangled or caught between the parts of a working industrial robot and killed.
The first recorded case of human death inflicted by an industrial robot happened in 1979 when a robotic arm crushed Robert Williams in a Ford manufacturing facility in Michigan.
One of the latest examples of an industrial robot causing harm to a person did not take place in a high-tech factory but in an otherwise serene arena of a chess tournament in Moscow, Russia.
The victim was a child player named Christopher, whose finger was pinched and fractured by his robotic opponent during a chess game.
Despite the incident, tournament officials had no statement about the possibility of dismantling the robot.
10 /10 Chess Robot
The accurate benchmark of artificial intelligence is human behavior. The future is already here if a robot can think, behave, and make decisions like a person.
Humans and robots have long been compared in almost every aspect of cognition. One of the most frequently used proving grounds is a chess game.
In 1997, a supercomputer made by IBM – nicknamed Deep Blue – reached a level advanced enough to defeat Gary Kasparov.
More than 25 years later, another robot struck the 2022 Moscow Open.
9 /10 Physical Blow
The robot made headlines for an entirely different reason from what made Deep Blue famous.
As a starter, the game was played between a robot and a child, one of Russia’s under-nine Top 30 chess players.
More importantly, the headlines were not actually about the game itself or who won the match but a strange thing that happened during the play.
The robot grabbed an opponent’s finger and fractured it. For sure, such a physical attack was an illegal chess move.