Yesterday was World Day for Health and Safety at work and the theme for this year is “Safety and Health and the future of work”

Have you ever thought of what could happen when machines take over work, start attending to your physical requests and maybe even driving you? Is there a possibility of your safety being compromised? What can be put in place to effectively manage it?

When I was in Arizona last year for the Mandela Fellowship, there was an accident in Tempe involving one of the self driving cars and a woman lost her life. I remember mentioning at one of our visits to Maricopa County that even if self driving cars are allowed, we need to think about possible things that could go wrong and put control measures in place. For example, if the car lock malfunctions, how can the passenger open the car to exit safely? In the case of the accident mentioned above, the human operators were trained to always monitor the car so they can take over controls if the vehicle wants to make a wrong move but the human operator in this particular vehicle got distracted because she was streaming a show.
So, the human factor is still important in determining safety. Work would evolve, life would evolve because technology is here to stay but we have a choice. We have to choose to be responsible enough to monitor and come up with control measures to ensure we are safe at all times as the world begins to engage machines. We also have to choose to comply with the set control measures to reduce the probability of machine related accidents. Remember, your safety is your responsibility