Volkswagen confirmed on Monday that a robot killed one of its workers at a German factory in Baunatal, north of Frankfurt .
According to a report from the Financial Times, the “21 year old external contractor was installing the robot together with a colleague when he was struck in the chest by the robot and pressed against a metal plate.”
Unfortunately, the young man later succumbed to his injuries.
VW spokesman Heiko Hillwig told the Associated Press that “initial conclusions indicate that human error was to blame, rather than a problem with the robot, which can be programmed to perform various tasks in the assembly process”.
He declined to offer additional information as there’s an ongoing investigation on the incident.
While not forgetting that, a young man died, for all of you who are being reminded of the Terminator and Skynet, in an eerie coincidence, the story gained traction after a Financial Times employment correspondent named…Sarah O’Connor (in Terminator, it was Sarah Connor, but it’s close enough…) tweeted about it.
It didn’t take long for the internet to make the connection, even though O’Connor herself claimed to have no knowledge about the movie.
” Guys. I don’t know what skynet is. And I wouldn’t follow me – I tweet really boring stuff about unit wage costs and the like,” she wrote.
“Sigh. I’ve never even watched the films. Now my feed is full of people tweeting me about Skynet,” O’Connor tweeted later. “Ok. I should have thought about my name & its associations before tweeting this!”
*Note: stock VW picture used
A robot has killed a worker in a VW plant in Germany http://t.co/RRdCnNmbsj— Sarah O'Connor (@sarahoconnor_) July 1, 2015