Cameras now watch construction sites for hazards. Researchers say nobody has proven this prevents injuries.
Read that again. The product flags danger. The danger remains. The flag is excellent.
Picture the scene. A worker stands on a scaffold, four stories up. An algorithm notices he lacks a harness. It logs the finding with great precision. He falls anyway, but the dashboard is accurate.
This is the business model. Sell vigilance. Skip the outcome.
The researchers are polite about it. They say the evidence is limited. That is academic for "we looked for the part where people stop getting hurt and found a gift shop."
Think about the old safety system. A foreman with a clipboard, a bad knee, and a grudge. He spotted hazards too. He also yelled. Yelling has a long track record. Nobody put it in a pitch deck.
Now the hazard-spotting comes with a subscription fee, a software update, and a vendor named something like Vigilix. Somewhere, a startup founder says "pre-incident intelligence" with a straight face. Somewhere else, a retail trader buys the stock because the word "AI" was in the headline and the word "limited" was not.
Retail traders will love this one. A technology that notices problems and fixes nothing is the closest thing to their own portfolio review.
To be fair, detection matters. You cannot fix what you cannot see. But seeing a hole is not the same as filling it. A smoke detector that never summons anyone is just a tiny screaming ornament.
The construction industry will adopt this anyway. Nothing sells like a report proving you were warned.
The AI saw it coming. So did the guy falling. Only one of them filed a report.
Photo by Robin Jonathan Deutsch on Unsplash
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