Safety+Health: When it comes to keeping your workforce safe, providing proper personal protective equipment is just the start. Workplace safety programs of the future, however, will bring risk mitigation and incident prevention to the next level – including the ability to stop hazardous events from happening in the first place.
4 comments:
Having Artificial Intelligence be able to improve workplace safety seems like a really great use for something that often seems over used. The fact that this can be used to stop hazardous events from happening in the first place is extremely promising and could really make a difference. This could make a difference for technical directors because you cannot be looking at all parts of the shop at once and people sometimes make stupid and preventable mistakes. It could also help stage managers and production managers during load ins, techs, and strikes because they too cannot always be looking everywhere at once and again, people make silly and preventable errors. It makes me think of the Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark musical, where many mistakes were made. Some mistakes were more preventable than others, but all of them would have probably been helped by having a product like this.
This seems extremely useful; I could see this becoming popular in educational facilities or in training facilities/rooms. Often in educational settings such as high schools and colleges, some individuals using potentially dangerous tools have little training and prior knowledge, if any. This could help prevent some serious injuries, and when used in tandem with other safety features on tools (like a saw stop), it seems like these scene shops and fabrication shops could experience less injuries. There is of course the question of cost, as the article did not mention any type of pricing, and accessibility as a current barrier to making this kind of technology a norm or standard to expect. I do hope that one day this could become something that is expected to be in certain shops. It is extremely interesting how this technology could be able to detect so many different things, from missing PPE, to proximity dangers, to fallen people…
Here is the other side of all of my fears about the pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence in 2022. This is an example of how Artificial Intelligence can actually make a difference for the better. Especially in case of automation like Maggie mentioned. An AI guide program could monitor all sorts of data and connect them in ways that we just aren't able to fast enough to make a real difference.
Though I will say that I don't believe AI are powerful or predictable enough yet to fully rely on them. We see it all the time with the AI generate images online. Some of them are so realistic that it is actually terrifying. But then several others from the prompt will be so wildly off the mark despite following the prompt to the letter. Like sure, it's technically correct, but oftentimes it takes being a part of the human experience to be able to look at something and see that it obviously does not belong.
This technology is extremely exciting to me. I think that AI is being hugely explored at the moment and there are some negative things coming from it, but there are some HUGE developments like this one that are also coming from this advanced technology. The ability to potentially save someone’s life before even being at risk is huge. People shouldn’t have to continuously be exposed to workplace risk to discover that there was even a risk to begin with. I feel like there is a lot of pressure placed on the workers themselves to protect themselves in the workplace when I feel like we should be moving more towards actually having safe workplaces rather than placing all of the onus on the worker. This software forces supervisors to handle safety issues and can even correct them without the supervisor intervening. I am curious to see how workers will respond to this technology being implemented in their workplace though and if they are uncomfortable with constantly being watched throughout the day. Ultimately, this software has the power to save their lives, but I imagine some workers will be uncomfortable with this.
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