AI Looks Back, as Does Safety so, Where Will Innovation Come From?

Try an interesting experiment and look up yourself using AI and see what you find. What can AI do? It can scan the past and trawl through what’s available online but it can’t think critically (https://safetyrisk.net/what-is-critical-thinking-for-safety/ ), interpret, ask, think forward or embrace risk.

Ever since AI has been a fad, I have not updated any of my details online. So, when I asked AI for information on myself, apart from spelling my name properly, everything else was wrong.

AI can only look back; it can’t ‘think’ forward. It has no intuition nor embodied imagination, nor can it dream. Put AI to sleep and it’s a void. When I go to sleep my unconscious runs rampant, my dreams are vivid, I enter other worlds and I wake with new visions. Dreaming is risky. Imagination is risky. Creativity and learning to embrace the unknown is risky. What we experience and learn in Psychedelics, Socilaitie and Evolution (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425/full) can never be known in safety or AI. How can you move forward into innovation by playing it safe?

I saw recently on Linkedin (yes I have no choice but to be there), a conversation by Safety about my work, discussing a foundational semiotic model. The example was taken from a text that was over ten years old. Supposedly the discussion was meant ‘for information’ however, the model was so old, it was really about dis-information. Nothing about the model that was selected remains in that form. In SPoR, things evolve and move within a philosophy (methodology) that was developed 40 years ago.

What is common with both examples is that neither AI nor Safety seem to be able to enquire or ask/consult with a view to learning. It’s pretty clear that Safety gets excited talking about stuff that is decades old. The recent publication of Energy-Based safety is a classic example of Safety getting excited about something that was developed 40 years ago. It’s all been done before and Safety just throws in a few extra slogans. But above all things, don’t ask, don’t enquire, don’t imagine, play safe.

Safety seems very much like AI, it’s so good at looking backwards with so little ability to look forwards.

How will Safety ever innovate (https://safetyrisk.net/can-innovation-come-from-within-safety/) if it has no imagination to dream and envision? (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/envisioning-risk-seeing-vision-and-meaning-in-risk/). It doesn’t even use such language.

Fostering imagination, intuition and taking dreams seriously, is not the conversation of Safety or AI. Such is too risky.

Where are the conversations in safety about the unconscious? How is innovation going to emerge from an industry fixated on objects, energy, hazards, materialist physicality and systems? How can envisioning emerge from an industry that plays it safe? How can innovation emerge from an industry that labels all it doesn’t know and understand as ‘toxic’? How can safety be so fixated on ‘science’ and yet have so little desire to learn what it doesn’t know?

Klein’s book Seeing What Other’s Don’t (https://archive.org/details/seeingwhatothers0000klei_g6q1) is a great read about the acquisition of insight. Where does insight come from? From conservativism? From safety? No, it comes from risk!

 Sadly, imagination in risk is constrained by everything Safety represents.

Risk aversion is about looking back, risk innovation is about letting go of the past and looking forward.

How can you gain insight without risk? How can you move into the realm of the ‘unknown unknowns’ when it’s safer in what is known? How can you embrace change from the comfort of safety? How can you learn without letting go of the past?

One of the beauties of Poetics (https://safetyrisk.net/understanding-poetics-and-risk/ ) is the will to embrace risk. Yet, there is no discussion of Poetics in safety. In Poetics, everything is about empowering the imagination, the unconscious and dreaming possibilities.

Just look at the difference in the discourse (using Critical Discourse Analysis) and language of Safety and, the discourse of Poetics (https://safetyrisk.net/poetics-and-risk/ ). Then ask, where will innovation come from for safety?

When zero is adored, stasis is a core value and performance is the discourse, there will be no creativity by embracing risk.

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Prof. Robert Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions

Latest posts by Prof. Robert Long (see all)

• Poetics and Risk Workshop, From Language to Doing - December 12, 2025
• Divergent Thinking About Risk - December 7, 2025
• Stop the Train I Want to Get Off - December 7, 2025
• Safety Leadership - December 7, 2025
• Espoused Theory and Theory-in-Use in Safety - December 7, 2025

PhD., MEd., MOH., BEd., BTh., Dip T., Dip Min., Cert IV TAA, MRMIA Rob is the founder of Human Dymensions and has extensive experience, qualifications and expertise across a range of sectors including government, education, corporate, industry and community sectors over 30 years. Rob has worked at all levels of the education and training sector including serving on various post graduate executive, post graduate supervision, post graduate course design and implementation programs.