Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing Industry Worker Safety: A New Paradigm for Hazard Prevention and Mitigation

The phenomenal rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the last decade, and its evolution as a versatile addition to various fields, necessitates its usage for novel purposes in multidimensional fields like the manufacturing industry. Even though AI has been rigorously studied for process optimization, wastage reduction, and other quintessential aspects of the manufacturing industry, there has been limited focus on worker safety as a theme in the current literature. Safety standards contribute to worker safety, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach in these standards or policies, which warrants evaluation and integration of new ideas and technologies to reach the closest to ideal standards. This includes but is not limited to health, regulation of operations, predictive maintenance, and automation and control. The rise of Industry 4.0 and the migration towards Industry 5.0 facilitate easy integration of advanced technologies like AI into the manufacturing industry with real-time predictive capabilities, and this can help reduce human errors and mitigate hazards in processes where sensitivity is crucial or hazards are frequent. Keeping the future outlook in focus, AI can contribute to training workers in risk-free environments, promote engineering education for easy adaptation to new technology, and reduce resistance to changes in the industry. Furthermore, there is an urgent need for standards and regulations to govern and integrate AI technologies judiciously into the manufacturing industry, which holds AI models and their creators accountable for their decisions. This could further extend to preventing the adversarial use of new technology. This study exhaustively discusses the potential and ongoing contributions of this technology to the safety of workers in the manufacturing industry.