The first person known to have been killed by a robot was Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. In 1979, a robot that was supposed to retrieve parts from a storage area malfunctioned, and he climbed into the area to get the parts himself. The robot silently began operating and smashed his head, continuing for thirty minutes until his co-workers discovered what had happened.17 The next robot victim was Kenji Urada, a maintenance engineer at a Kawasaki plant in Akashi, Japan. While working on a broken robot in 1981, he accidentally hit its on switch and was crushed to
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