More of Safety talking to Safety About safety

So, we can now add a new area of expertise that Safety has acquired. We don’t just have Safety presenting on Ethics and Culture, we now have Safety parading a lack of expertise in Linguistics. Through the so-called lens of ‘language intelligence’.

Download HERE: Language Intelligence

However, if you actually read this goop, it has nothing to do with intelligence in language. It’s all about measurement to target performance. Again, what Safety does so well, talks about what it doesn’t know from people with no expertise in what they are talking about.

We have seen this before with the nonsense idea of ‘useability mapping’, coming from sources with no expertise in language comprehension, linguistics or education.

From the outset of this article and first line, it’s about ‘safety performance’ and you guessed it, ‘recordable injury rates’. Nothing about meaning, purpose or the nature of conversational listening. It’s all just about a Technique for analysing text using AI and even then, nothing in this is about the ethical issues concerning recording conversations and using undisclosed data mining methods for an undisclosed purpose. Check this out:

‘Recent technological innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) are transforming these daily planning conversations from paper checkboxes into catalysts for operational excellence (Pettinger & Nelson, 2024)’.

All three (artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and natural language processing (NLP)) is an ethical mine field but don’t you worry, this is safety, no need for moral accountability (https://safetyrisk.net/data-ethics-and-the-ethics-of-data-in-safety/) when it comes to lowering injury rates.

And, how is this going to happen?

‘By leveraging mobile technology to capture worksite planning conversions through video and audio recordings, construction firms can now automatically transcribe and analyze these daily exchanges.’

You can rely on one thing in safety, if any thought is required about ethical conduct, or legal competence, you won’t find it in Safety.

The ethical challenges in using conversations for a safety agenda is a minefield of ethical and legal problems. Guess what, no mention of any of this. Why think about ethics when we can get a safety engineer to tell us about it. And, just imagine the method of collection of language data by people with no expertise in Linguistics, grammar, paralinguistics or ethics!!! And much of the basis for the article is based upon research that is dated and has no connection to the bias of safety performance.

This so-called analysis also includes the use of data from mobile phones and the nonsense of ‘machine learning’, which of course, doesn’t exist.

I can just imagine the first prosecution of mis-interpretation of language illegally collected and used against a worker.

 Of course, the article is all about measurement and performance and just look at this language of ‘leverage’.

Just look at the mention of NLP! Anyone with any expertise in NLP knows that it is a practice fraught with ethical problems concerning manipulative techniques and anchored to unethical practice (https://steemit.com/psychology/@souldis/the-dark-side-of-neuro-linguistic-programming-nlp-dangers-and-manipulation-techniques).

 Yet, here is this article completely immersed in using NLP techniques for ‘prediction’, ‘sentiment analysis’ and ‘hierarchical clustering’. And all of this from sources with no expertise in learning, semantics, linguistics, ethics or semiotics.

This is what Safety does best. It jumps right into anything it can use for a safety outcome and then expects safety to be a justification for unethical practice. I can see the prosecutions lining up.

Then we have the idea of ‘conversation scoring’. Really?

All this article demonstrates is the utter naivety concerning the nature of interpretation, ignorance about linguistics, context, culture and associated harm associated with psychological manipulation. Just read between the lines of this goop:

‘Armed with this objective evidence, the utility could provide targeted development and restructure team assignments to strategically upskill at-risk groups.’

Objective evidence!!! Really??? Only Safety can dream up such nonsense.

 And, knowing about the ignorance of Safety and its lack of ethical expertise, this represents the ultimate in naivety. There is no objectivism in language, linguistics or conversation regardless of how data is accumulated according to whoever’s undeclared bias.

Any idea that conversations can receive a measurement score is complete nonsense. It is only by insane safety assumption that one can give a qualitative conversation a quantitative score.

This whole article is a complete disaster waiting to happen.

I would suggest that Safety go back to the ethics drawing board, develop some moral and legal competence before taking any of this article seriously. The assumptions and projections of this stuff is dangerous, harmful and could only be taken seriously by Safety speaking to Safety about safety.

Anyone with half a brain of caution, jurisprudence and critical thinking ought to start by reading: Hasselbalch (2021) Data Ethics of Power A Human Approach in the Big Data and AI Era. Then after a good read, work out that the best way to learn about Linguistics is NOT by consulting Safety. Just as we know that Safety is neither the source of any knowledge on Ethics or Culture.

 

brhttps://safetyrisk.net/more-of-safety-talking-to-safety-about-safety/
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