Reasons why UAE employees lack trust in robots

Workers in the UAE trust robots to perform mundane tasks in logistics, transportation and cleaning, but are less willing to trust them to perform life-critical functions such as performing surgeries, flying planes without a pilot, and managing hazardous manufacturing or pharmaceutical production.

According to a study by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, one of the reasons for people’s lack of trust in robots is the perception that they are vulnerable to cyberattacks: a view supported by 70% of employees in the UAE.

Employees see robots as suitable for some duties but not others. For example, 84% trust robots to do cleaning work, and 77% trust robots to deliver packages and orders.

Meanwhile, less than half of workers trust robots for tasks such as managing hazardous manufacturing, and just one-third of respondents trust robots to perform surgeries.

These concerns can be explained by the fact that more than half of employees pointed out that it is not clear who will be held responsible if a robot is unable to perform its duties due to equipment failure or cyber attack. And 52% of employees believe that if the robot malfunctions, it will pose a physical threat to humans.

Emad Haffar, head of technical experts at Kaspersky, said: “Today, robotics is used together with industrial control systems and other information technologies to handle production processes, replacing human labor and increasing efficiency, speed, quality and performance.”

“Our research shows that employees are split on the duties that robots are suitable for. While the average employee is ready for robots to perform unskilled tasks such as cleaning and order delivery, most are not yet ready to trust robots with critical functions , these features, if done wrong, could cause economic loss or pose a physical threat to humans.”

To protect your system from various threats, Kaspersky recommends:

• Conduct regular security assessments of operational technology (OT) systems to identify and eliminate possible cybersecurity issues.
• Establish continuous vulnerability assessment and classification as the foundation of an effective vulnerability management process.
• The key components of the enterprise OT network are updated in time.
• Improve response to new and advanced malicious techniques by building and strengthening your team’s incident prevention, detection, and response skills.

read: Amazon’s New Warehouse Robots Could One Day Replace Humans