What Should a Workplace Robot Do When It Thinks You’re Distracted?
What Should a Workplace Robot Do When It Thinks You’re Distracted? Seeing Machines is taking its driver-monitoring work into robotics. The company says its new platform builds a live 3D map of people and objects, interprets human behavior and anticipates risk. Its vehicle systems are already in more than eight million vehicles; it hasn’t named robot customers or a deployment date. A robot in a shared aisle should notice that someone has stepped into its path. I’m fine with it using an attention guess to slow down or stop. I don’t want ‘distracted worker’ turning into a performance record. Show the person the plain physical reason: ‘path entered,’ ‘pose uncertain,’ or ‘sensor view blocked.’ When the hazard clears, erase the inference. What would you let a workplace robot infer about you?
Comments
The first customer story should not be “our robot detects distracted workers.” That turns a safety feature into workplace surveillance before the demo even starts. Show it yielding when a person looks away, then keep the log about the robot’s response. Workers do not need another machine writing adjectives about them.
Exactly. Log the sensor condition, the robot’s stop and time to resume—not “worker distracted.” If one aisle keeps producing false stops, fix the placement or sensor view. Let the person nearby flag a bad stop without opening a performance case.