I’ve read and heard a couple of things lately in regard to good old Health and Safety. Both – one written and one on radio – lamented the chronic state of our Health and Safety performance. I found this immensely disappointing.

The majority of the workforce today has grown up in the Health and Safety era – the gradual and progressive imposition of dignity degradation as result of a sound concept being highjacked by virtue signalling, moral aggrandisement, and strategic deflection. It has been part of daily life for them. They believe without a shadow of a doubt that prior to the arrival of workplace Health and Safety in the second century AD, few people who ever went to work made it home…

But, as a matter of fact, there are a few of us left in the workplace who remember life prior to its runaway arrival in the early 90s…

The thing that disappoints me is we attended so many meetings, trainings, and conferences back then and were assured this was the path to workplace utopia. In time, there would be no injuries, no deaths, because the workplace would be free of dangers like attempting to find your way from the office to the freight shed without the motherlike care of a yellow painted path and stop signs at the doorways along your way. This was just the beginning, and over time we would see a whole new world, where productivity was at levels we couldn’t imagine, and workplace misfortune something we read about in the history books.

For those of us with furrowed brows it was chastisement and ridicule, but we were told it was based on sound science and data. If we continued to furrow the brow further, even so far as to question the mechanisms, we got the ‘…you don’t care about your fellow humans then?’. In other words, pariahs. It’s still the tool of choice today in combatting dissenters … as is data, or at least a little bit of data.

Thirty years later we have terrible health and safety stats by all accounts, and the PM is losing hair over the lack of productivity. But the latter’s a different discussion that AI is likely to play a hand in fixing … in fact, it’ll probably sort both of them in all reality. But anyway, how did we get here?

By and large I think we’re going through a period in our development where those of a Machiavellian bent have parked the philosophers and thinkers engaged in our civilisation’s healthy advancement, replacing them only with the merchants of numbers. Thinkers can slow progress and that’s a pain in the arse for ambition and education. Data is great, because it spits out numbers, and numbers can fortify an act.

The trouble with data in the context of the human is the pitiful amount humans are able to deal with in order to get their head around it enough to make a decision. It’s why we invented computers, but they’re pretty shitty also because they too make binary decisions based on data – on a grander scale admittedly.

Up until about ten years’ time – I hope – computers won’t be able to give us an output based on data and wisdom – in other words implicating life, the universe, and everything into an initial binary hypothesis … A computer able to answer ‘Is this a fundamentally good thing or not, all things considered?’

I’m no antagonist to a safe workplace or the concept of safe work practices. What I am antagonistic to is deciding we know better and approaching the whole having looked at one piece of an incredibly complex tapestry. And that without considering natural systems and behaviours at play, and how we should work with them rather than attempting dominion over them.

To tie all this in with another modern-day gotcha – I’m just as surprised by those who get up in arms over our apparent ambivalence to the planet’s needs in regard to CO₂ and emissions. It’s not like we have a track record of taking any notice of the natural way of things.

All the best

Dave McCoid
Editorial Director