GE has started a marketing campaign in America that is based on power-tools made accessible to the public. Note the quote on safety caught by Mashable Business.

Despite obvious liability issues involved in letting the public operate your power tools, GE global director of communications Linda Boff assures us there’s no need to worry about lost fingers.

“We have a lot of faith in people,” Boff says. “And the tools will be well supervised.”

What would you make in the GE Garage? Tell us in the comments.

What would I make in a garage that has faith-based power tool safety? Can I be Anonymous? Kidding. (I was just having a conversation with Joshua Corman about Anonymous attacks after he called them a “mirror to our neglect”)

Here’s a sobering data point: table saws are involved in 30,000 incidents per year in the US alone. That’s a lot of lost fingers. As a result there are some really smart safety innovations going on (obviously outside of GE’s faith-based Garage) such as SawStop.

That’s the kind of innovation I would like to see come out of a GE project with power-tools. Tools that allow people to be more productive with less risk is what spurs wider and more frequent innovation. Simply providing access to tools is great but the macro view is that risk plays a major factor. GE should know that faith just doesn’t cut it (pun not intended).