FEATURE
only part of the puzzle that needs to be solved. Famously, the author Isaac Asimov invented the “Three Laws of Robotics” - a set of principles by which an imagined future society decided how robots could safely function alongside people. We can say right now with 100% certainly that it’s premature to worry about a robot gritter uprising, but even so it’s still important to think ahead. Look at the challenges being presented by autonomous vehicles, where the human dilemmas and potential legal pitfalls are being cautiously explored. To see this in action, consider The Moral Machine, a brilliant online resource from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where you can role play scenarios relating to the “moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars”. For example, in the face of an inevitable crash, how can and should an autonomous machine choose the lesser of two evils between killing its two passengers or five pedestrians? This grisly illustration, shows the sort of heavy lifting that human operators can’t easily delegate. It’s a key reason why today’s Telsas, BMWs and Volvos can technically drive themselves on motorways, but still require you to keep a hand on the wheel.
In the FM context, robots such as automated gritters exist in a lawless frontier where the challenges are still being understood and the rules are as yet unwritten. The same transition can be seen in other areas of modern life being changed by technology: The phrase “unexpected item in bagging area” haunts every visit to a supermarket and shows the friction that exists where messy human life meets dumb, inflexible machine logic. While we can put up
with a certain amount of chaos from an automated retail experience, in safety critical contexts such as transport, manufacturing, and (soon), snow and ice removal, AI will still need a human hand on the wheel.
For this reason, it is also premature to see the introduction of robotics into sectors like FM as a threat to jobs. Instead, data and robotics will, for the foreseeable future, be much like previous industrial revolutions - with technology serving as force multipliers that make human workers more productive and efficient. For example, it's most likely that your first sighting of an automatic gritter will be as it clears larger areas like car parks while a supervising human worker tackles trickier areas like stairs and paths while monitoring the robot’s performance and carrying out any necessary maintenance. Just like many other industries disrupted by technology, gritting will continue to be a human industry but workers will increasingly swap manual labour for a more sophisticated set of skills. And it will be worth it: teams using technology will be able to clear more locations each night to an even better, safer standard. The result will be lower risk to those working and visiting a site, with a reduction in costs and liability exposure for owners and managers.
Today, sophisticated bespoke technology is already helping our people deliver an award-winning service that’s been tested under the toughest conditions. But there’s always room for improvement: we’re looking forward to welcoming you to the team, RoboGrit.
www.gritit.com
www.tomorrowsfm.com
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