John Howard

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Washington, D.C.

17 October 2014

Annual Scientific Meeting

Michigan Occupational and Environmental Medicine Association

Detroit, Michigan

7 Topics in OHS Technology vs Jobs

Workforce Demographics

3-D Manufacturing

Robotics and Sensors

Biology as Technology

Data, Data and More Data!

Supply Chain Safety

Technology versus Jobs 1914—One in three Americans worked on a farm

2014—Less than 2% of them produce far more food

Technology versus Jobs Innovation kills some jobs and creates others, but it

does not do it at the same time

Second Machine Age “Technological Unemployment”

Short-term Problems

Income gaps widen

Lower employment

Social dislocations

Changes in politics

Technology versus Jobs

Which jobs are safe? 47% job categories will be subject to

automation in next two decades

Job Transitions Like the machine age in the 19th

century, new machine age jobs will look different

Nobility of jobs

19h century—working in the fields, nobler than at the loom?

21st century—working in manufacturing, nobler than services or paperwork?

Technology versus Jobs Rich economies seem to be

bifurcating into 2 groups of workers: Smaller group of workers with skills highly

complementary with machine intelligence

Larger group—not so much

“The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” 47% U.S. employment at risk

Wages and education negative relationship with probability of computerization

Frey & Osborne (2013)

Technology versus Jobs: Past and Future

When Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012, it had 30 million customers and employed 13 people

Kodak—which filed for bankruptcy in 2012—employed 145,000 people in its heyday

How many of those were OEHS specialists protecting workers against hazards?

Google now employs 46,000 people

How many of those are OEHS specialists protecting against work-related hazards?

Where Is Technology Taking Us? Good Direction

Innovation always drives advances in mankind’s standard of living

Bad Direction Gap growing between those whose

skills are enhanced by tech and those whose skills are not

Latter will get jobs machines cannot do

Recommendations: Develop skills that complement, not

compete with technology

Don’t follow the example of horses

“They were never able to adjust to the invention of the automobile or tractor”

The U.S. Workforce Population: 318,000,000

Net gain of 1 person each 17 seconds (births, deaths, immigration)

http://www.census.gov/popclock/

Working Age Population: 142,284,000 6.2% -- U3 —Total unemployed as percent of civilian workforce (December 2013)

13.0% -- U6 —Total unemployed = total employed part time for economic reasons + all persons marginally attached to the labor force (17.2% Gallup)

5% on SSDI

U.S. Population Replacement

In-country births Current fertility rate: 1.89 children/woman

Replacement fertility rate: 2.1 children/woman

From out-of-country Immigration—difficult after 9/11/2001

Growth in the Working-Age Population

Source: Deloitte Research/UN Population Division (http://esa.un.org/unpp/) It’s 2008: Do You

Know Where Your Talent Is? Why Acquisition and Retention Strategies Don’t Work, p.6

-50%

0%

50%

100%

150%

200%

Mexico Brazil India China South Australia Canada US Netherlands Spain France UK Russia Italy Japan Germany

Korea

1970-2010

2010-2050

The Workforce— Too Few, Too Chronologically-Gifted, Too Unhealthy?

Diabesity and the Future Workforce 39 States with 40% of young adults considered to be

overweight or obese in just last decade!

In Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi, >50% young adults are overweight

Medical Consequences: High Blood Pressure

Elevated cholesterol

Increased Type 2 Diabetes (formerly called adult-onset)

Hepatic steatosis epidemic (fat deposits in the liver)

Sleep apnea (too much fat around the upper airway)

Musculoskeletal disorders What the mature and young worker share

Total Worker HealthTM

Comprehensive organizational strategy that

Integrates occupational health protection with wellness promotion

To advance worker well-being in life and work.

3-D Manufacturing

3-D Manufacturing Process of making a three-dimensional solid object of virtually

any shape from a digital model.

3D printing is achieved using an additive process, where successive layers of material are laid down in different shapes. Not your father’s traditional machining

Which relies on the removal of material by methods such as cutting or drilling (subtractive processes).

3D technology began in 1980s—printers became widely available commercially in 2010.

Market for 3D printers and services was worth $2.2 billion worldwide in 2012, up 29% from 2011.

3-D Manufacturing Does 3-D manufacturing remove the need for the

traditional OEHS specialists from manufacturing?

Occupational Robotics

At MIT Management robot is learning to run a factory and give orders to

artificial co-workers

A bakebot can make a cookie from scratch

UC Berkeley A robot can do laundry and then neatly fold shirts and towels

Engineering the human health hazard out of the job? Prevention-through-Design

Engineering the job out of human hands?

Not All the Way to Robots… Powered exoskeletons

New types of MSDs?

www.cyberonicscom/

HAL Worker Meets the Royals

Autonomous vehicle technology came up during nearly every concept car unveiling at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit January 13, 2014.

Michigan legislature passed a law last month authorizing the testing of self-driving cars. State is partnering with the University of Michigan's Mobility Transformation

Center to kick exploration of intelligent transportation into another gear.

Just a matter of time and technology Lane detection technology advancing rapidly

Automatic braking technology advancing rapidly

Are fleet managers ready?

Autonomous Vehicle Technology

That the Blind May See

Human Sensors

Sight

Hearing

Taste

Smell

Touch

Bio-Sensors Google announces 'smart' contact lenses that monitor

glucose levels (January 16, 2014)

Modern Self = Quantified Self Keeping track of personal health data

Chemical load counts in the body

Personal genome sequencing

Monitoring your epigenome to see how exposures have altered it? www.23andme.com

Life-logging

Self Experimentation

Risks/Legal Rights/Duties

Behavior monitoring

Location tracking

Non-invasive probes

Digitizing body info

Sharing Health Records

Psychological Self-Assessments

Medical Self-Diagnostics

Dsdfs

Exposure Science: Engineering Out the IH

Work environment Direct-reading instruments

Personal Dust Monitor

Explosibility Meter

Sensors

Biologic environment Biomarkers of exposure

Biomarkers of effect

In-dwelling monitors enabled by nanosensors that circulate sending data back to a central database

Direct Sensing and Direct Reporting

Robotic Insects Make First Controlled Flight

Insect-Scale Robots

80-milligram flapping-wing robot modeled loosely on the morphology of flies (Diptera).

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

Nano-enabled with sensors and cameras?

Ma KY, Chiraattananon P, Fuller SB, Wood RJ. Science 2013;340:603-607

Biology as a Technology

Design and construction of new biological entities:

Enzymes, genetic circuits, and cells or

Redesign of existing biological systems

Synthetic biology

Seeks to transform biology in the same way that:

Synthesis transformed chemistry

Integrated circuit design transformed computing

Enabling Synthetic Biology

DNA sequencing and synthesis

Sequencing has increased our understanding of the components and organization of natural biological systems and

Synthesis has provided the ability to begin to test the designs of new, synthetic biological parts and systems.

Synthetic Biology

Just as engineers now design integrated circuits based on the known physical properties of materials and then fabricate functioning circuits and entire processors (with relatively high reliability)

Synthetic biologists will soon design and build engineered biological systems.

Synthetic Biology Agendas Understanding Functional Biology

Understand how to reconstitute a functional system from its basic parts

Extending Biology

How to extend biology like synthesis and integrated circuitry extended chemistry and computing.

Optimizing Human Beings

Natural living systems can be optimized for human intention

Synthetic Biology—Implications Synthetic biology shows promise, but many other

foundational scientific and engineering challenges must be solved in order to make the engineering of biology routine.

Meanwhile, there is a lot of experimentation going on

With experimentation comes exposure

Exposure—Hazard—Risk

Who is managing the safety and health risks?

Risk Management of Synthetic Life

Biocontainment through engineered auxotrophy Engineer organisms that are unable to synthesize an essential

compound required for their survival

Active containment through induced lethality Kill switch—an inducer signal could be used to clean up

synthetic microbe spills

Risk-related analysis and data reporting standards should be developed now

Moe-Behrens GHG et al. Preparing Synthetic Biology for the World. Frontiers in Microbiology 2013;4:1-10.

Electronic Health Record: Big Data in the Making

Big data source

Majority of hospitals use EHR

Interoperability challenges?

Connected health

Virtual health

Telehealth

Disruptive of the “old model of care” Local & Synchronous

Costly

Remote and Asynchronous

Less costly?

Big Data: Issues As data sets get bigger, other values and interests

emerge:

Data ownership vs. custodianship

Data mining rights

Data sharing and transparency:

Right to look at data others have collected

Right to use other people’s data for a purpose different that the one under which it was collected

Everybody Wants to See Your Data “With the information acquired

through this proposed rule, employers, employees, the government and researchers will have:

Better access to data

Resulting in improved programs to reduce workplace hazards and prevent injuries, illnesses and fatalities.

We encourage the public to review this proposed rule and look forward to their comments.”

— Dr. David Michaels Assistant Secretary of

Labor for Occupational Safety and Health

Big Data Leads to Predictive Analytics If you have enough data, can you predict what will happen?

Belief can be traced to marketing theory and practice

Fact that machines are not just cleverer, they also have access to far more data (Watson versus humans)

Can big data + forecasting predict the future?

To Lag or To Lead— That is the Question

“Lagging indicators are like driving a car while looking backwards.”

Gary Rosenblum, NSC Campbell Institute

Lots of interest by very smart people Some interesting anecdotes

Lots of trade publications

Little rigorous empirical scholarship

Where are we at now?

Probably not one, or two, or even three, such indicators

Indicators may be sector/establishment/activity based

Responsible Investing: Using Injury Data

Uploading injury and illness data to Bloomberg Investors

Another analytic for investors to use

When DWH occurred, not

only did BP share dip but so did other similar sector stocks

Supply Chain Safety April 24, 2013

Rana Plaza in Dhaka, the collapsed. Vast majority of workers killed or injured were garment workers

Financial Reporting is an international standard

Social Responsibility (Non-Financial Reporting) is not

Integrated reporting—combining both financial and non-financial information about enterprise performance into One Report—in order to facilitate full transparency and socially responsible reporting.

Integrated sustainability reporting among large multi-nationals, cascading down through their global supply chain source—both known and unknown—could be a vehicle that may raise the level of safety for Rana Plaza workers throughout the world.

European Commission: Non-Financial Reporting

European Parliament adopted on 15 April 2014 the directive on disclosure of non-financial and diversity information by certain large companies and groups.

Companies concerned will need to disclose information on policies, risks and outcomes as regards environmental matters, social and employee-related aspects, respect for human rights, anti-corruption and bribery

issues, and diversity in their board of directors. The new rules will only apply to some large companies with more than 500

employees.

In particular, large public-interest entities with more than 500 employees will be required to disclose certain non-financial information in their management report. This includes listed companies as well as some unlisted companies, such as banks, insurance companies, and other companies that are so designated by Member States because of their activities, size or number of employees.

Worker Safety Regulation