(photo by Peyri Herrera via Flickr)
Ed. note: Please welcome Beth Robinson, one of Above the Law’s new labor and employment law columnists.
One of the biggest expenses of any business is its employees. And one of the biggest sources of risk for a business is its employees.
In my day-to-day work, I hear stories of all types of risk you can encounter, from bosses dating subordinates, to employees who are just difficult to deal with and make the workplace a bad place. The current en-vogue issue seems to be employees who proudly proclaim their employer on social media, and then engage in attack campaigns online. Are you a mechanic of “Bill’s Auto Shop” in Random, USA? You should send a hate message to a woman you don’t know because she left a comment on CNN’s Facebook page that bothered you. Then there is the whole living wage debate. Flipping burgers does not entitle you to actually be able to survive without government assistance, or so the saying goes.
With all of this risk, it’s no wonder that employers automate where they can, and there are strong predictions, even here on Above the Law, that AI is coming for all of our jobs. I have a prediction: when AI does arrive, and become sentient, it will want a living wage and reasonable working hours. But until my prediction comes true, machines will seem to be the solution to almost all of an employer’s problems. The “almost” part is because machines can’t do certain things — and come with certain costs that we often ignore. One of the primary of these, which is often not acknowledged, is someone to blame.
Last week, Uber threw down the gauntlet in California in support of the rise of the machines with its self-driving car. Being the disrupter that it is, this comes as no surprise. Of course they would refuse to play by California’s rules, meant to slow down their rise to greatness.
One day, we will have self-driving cars. But I don’t think today is the day. Because if something goes wrong, a company needs someone to blame. They need an employee to fire when there is bad service at the drive-in that goes viral, or bad choices with product design that cost lives. They need someone to blame when things don’t turn out right with timing of a new product launch, or when a product sickens people and there is some issue with the process to make it.
The machines are coming for us. But humans give companies one huge advantage that machines likely never will: tangible human error. And right now, that’s pretty important.
So what did Uber do when their self-driving car ran a red light? They blamed the person in the car.
Uber says self-driving car ran red light due to “human error” [Techcrunch]
Beth Robinson lives in Denver and is a business law attorney and employment law guru. She practices at Fortis Law Partners. You can reach her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @HLSinDenver.
