this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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I'm 100% for more regulation and more caution but I don't understand using the "robots" terminology unless you are trying to conflate it with AI.. which absolutely does need regulation and caution. There's a lot of harm that they can do. But early on in the article to prove "just how long robots have been killing humans" they describe an accident at a manufacturing facility that uses those robotic arms. And a man was told to enter the machine to adjust something while it was running. You know, they did that back in the cotton mills too. Had children run under the running machinery to collect fallen cotton. And children died in the mills when the machines would come smashing into them.
Did we come to the conclusion that cotton mills are a menace? Yes. Well, not because the machines were out of control right? The people running the mill and telling people to move into the dangerous machinery were the menace. And it's the exact same for the opening argument in this article. Someone was instructed to do something dangerous that they should never have been asked to do, and they died.
So yes, let's be careful about new tech. But let's be more careful about how business owners will abuse the people around the tech. Please.
Agreed. Strong (and effectively enforced) worker protections are just as important as tech-specific safety regulations. Nobody should feel like they need to put themselves into a risky situation to make work happen faster, regardless of whether their employer explicitly asks them to take that risk or (more likely) uses other means like unrealistic quotas to pressure them indirectly.
There are certainly ways to make working around robots safer, e.g. soft robots, machine vision to avoid unexpected obstacles in the path of travel, inherently limiting the force a robot can exert, etc... And I'm all for moving in the direction of better inherent safety, but we also need to make sure that safer systems don't become an excuse for employers to expose their workers to more risky situations (i.e. the paradox of safety).