Irresponsible AI Adoption in Safety-Critical Sectors
- Raimund Laqua
- 54 minutes ago
- 1 min read
There was a time when safety was engineered into the business, the plant, and the operations. It required qualified engineers to ensure harm was avoided, and that risks, when they occurred, were mitigated.
Systems were built with instrumentation, controls, and adaptive regulators to keep everything operating within safe limits. This was done so that everyone had the best possible chance of returning home to their families at the end of the day.
Then someone threw a stochastic wrench into the works — an organizational hazard that was unregulated, uncontrolled, and did not follow the life-saving rules.
They called it AI.
They said it would help save lives.
But it could not do that without first destroying the very means by which safety was assured. It eliminated the people who knew how things worked. It removed those who had our backs and kept us safe.
This was not responsible AI. It was irresponsible adoption.
A decision to proceed in the presence of uncertainty where there is the possibility of harm is an ethical choice. This should never be left to algorithmic or stochastic probabilities.
This is what makes AI adoption an ethical choice.
Choose Wisely.
Raimund Laqua, P.Eng., PMP, is the founder of Lean Compliance and one of Ontario's first licensed software engineers. He helps organizations in safety-critical and highly regulated sectors build compliance that keeps its promises. He is a long-standing advocate for professional digital engineering and the accountable adoption of AI.
