Nowadays, when people talk about the ‘threat’ of robots in the workplace they usually allude to the idea that high-performing machines may soon put us all out of jobs.
But a new lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Michigan is giving the phrase a whole new (and darker) meaning by conjuring up one of our worst fears about technology: the rise of the killer robot.
In July 2015, a woman named Wanda Holbrook was inspecting a malfunctioning unit on a trailer assembly line at Ventra Main—an auto parts factory based in Michigan—when she was trapped by a rogue factory robot and killed, according Courthouse News.
As a maintenance technician, part of Wanda’s job involved performing maintenance duties on fixture tooling. That afternoon, she was doing just that when a robot unexpectedly activated itself and began loading a part into the unit she was repairing, crushing her skull, killing her.
“Wanda was working in either section 140 or 150 within the ‘100’ cell, when a robot from section 130 took Wanda by surprise, entering the section she was working in.
“Upon entering the section, the robot hit and crushed Wanda’s head between a hitch assembly it was attempting to place in the fixture of section 140, and a hitch assembly that was already in the fixture,” the lawsuit states.
Wanda was found by fellow employees and pronounced dead at the scene.
Following his wife’s gruesome death, Wanda’s husband William filed a wrongful death complaint, in which he is suing a total of five companies: the three companies that built the robot (Fanuc America, Nachi Robotic, and Lincoln Electric) and the two companies responsible for installing and servicing the unit (Flex-N-Gate, Prodomax) for failing to prevent an accident that could have been avoided had better safeguards been in place.
According to the complaint, safety doors that were installed specifically to prevent robots from moving to a different unit were not effective.
“The robot from section 130 should have never entered section 140, and should have never attempted to load a hitch assembly within a fixture that was already loaded with a hitch assembly,” the suit says.
“A failure of one or more of defendants’ safety systems or devices had taken place, causing Wanda’s death.”
Holbrook’s widower also claims that the automation system was not properly designed, manufactured and tested and failed numerous safety regulations relating to robot equipment.
He is seeking unspecified damages for claims of product liability and breach of implied warranty, arguing that the companies’ negligence led his wife to suffer “tremendous fright, shock and conscious pain and suffering.”
As unusual as it may seem, this case raises the grim but important question of who—or what—should be held liable when robots injure or kill human staff.
According to data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, robots were responsible at least 33 workplace deaths and injuries in the United States in the last 30 years.
With more and more companies phasing out manual labor in favor of autonomous and artificially intelligent machines, however, these type of casualties could become increasingly common. Last year’s high-profile accident involvingTesla’s self-driving system is a case in point (After investigation, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ended up clearing Tesla’s Autopilot system for any fault in the accident and even praised its safety design.)
In Wanda’s case, attorneys argue that the companies that built the robot should bear responsibility for the accident because they failed to institute and enforce basic security features that could have stopped the technology from going haywire. But what about self-learning machines?
For lawyers like John Frank Weaver, who specializes in artificial intelligence law, a future in which free-roaming robots are granted legal personhood might not be so distant:
“In the same way you cannot sue a person who is nearby an accident if he did nothing to cause the accident, you should not be able to sue the owner or operator of an autonomous drone who did nothing wrong while the drone was autonomously operating” he wrote in Slate recently.
Holbrook v. Prodomax, in the meantime, is awaiting trial.
