As artificial intelligence systems demonstrate impressive capabilities in pattern recognition and data analysis, should these systems generate safety recommendations based on analytics?

This question requires careful examination of both AI's technical capabilities and the organizational dynamics that govern safety improvement. 

Joshua Hubbard interviews Savannah Vlasman, a behavioral scientist with academic roots at Harvard and Erasmus and nearly two decades of experience decoding organizational dynamics, about the oft misunderstood concept of safety culture, exploring its connection to human factors, and how Sociometri is helping organizations translate cultural data into real-world risk reduction.

Those of us in the aviation profession, whether we maintain the aircraft or fly them, have all heard of Human Factors at some point in our career.  But do we actually know what Human Factors is?  Or, is it, what Human Factors are? 

A series of serious and sometimes fatal incidents involving Boeing aircraft in recent years – particularly the 737 Max disasters in Ethiopia and Indonesia – has seen the reputation of this once great American business almost completely destroyed.

This year marks the 21^st anniversary of an anonymous internal memo from Boeing engineers who wanted to state their human factors concerns and make their company’s damaging practices public knowledge.