Espresso 4.0 by
Wizata
Automation has been with us for a long time, whereas the connectivity and interconnectedness of equipment and operators using them is somewhat in its adolescence. The question for you and your experience is how important is this move to a more connected system in the manufacturing industry in particular?
Moving to a More Connected System
It's very critical. I'd be much happier working with a company with that digital plan or who intends to move more into the digital world. I'll use an analogy I was just thinking of earlier when we saw companies that historically, prior to the PCs, where all accountants were kept on ledgers, and production was kept on handwritten production notes. Someone would go around collecting those notes and ledgers, sit in the room, try to make sense of it all, and reform a game plan for the next year or quarter.
Digitization takes all that to the next level and even further. Evolution is not linear but rather exponential in these types of things. The opportunities to take advantage and move closer to digitalization will allow companies to make informed and accurate decisions while involving more parties rather than just doing it internally.
If it's a global company, it will allow them to take advantage of their purchasing power and lessons learned or share specific information with their targeted customers and suppliers. Digitalization opens up an absolute world of potential benefits for a customer that adopts a digital plan.
It opens us up to data, not only from our production but also from the other ends of the spectrum of the supply chain, and allows us to store it for longer times, access and process it at unprecedented speeds, and find business insights that we were unaware of before then.
You can go right from the front end of the company. If it has a sales department, ordering raw goods, inventory, shipping and receiving, you name it. There are opportunities to have all those worlds that have historically been siloed start sharing information and understanding each other more effectively and be more efficient.
How Automation Affects the Workforce?
Speaking of further automation, digitization and digitalization seems to be a growing concern in terms of how that will affect the workforce. How do you see the workshop in the future? Do you think we should be threatened with the creation of closed-loop systems and further automated production processes, or is there a light at the end of the road?
That is a personal choice of how people want to view it. I'm excited about it. There are many opportunities out there, and automation is likely to take the highest turnover jobs, the ones people don't like doing, either repetitive or non-rewarding. As we've seen in the past, automation will likely happen even in manufacturing. It will take those jobs first and work its way up.
As automation technologies become more capable, they will be able to perform more advanced tasks but likely again from the bottom of jobs where people don't either remain or feel rewarded. And I don't think that will be bad, especially considering our aging population.
I think it's going to be a necessity. We want to continue and maintain our standard of living. Automation will likely have to be a part of that because there won't be enough people taking care of our population. There'll probably be retraining, but I don’t foresee it being a bigger problem.
This is the fourth revolution, right? We've had them before, and they have had quite a big impact on the workforce. We have adapted to it and look at it as an ancient past, something that we could never return to. In that regard, it is a step forward. It is a matter of how you adapt to it and the perspective that you take on it.
Importance of User-Friendliness in Automation
Some of the current manufacturers' back-end software for condition monitoring, say, SCADA or something like that, is dizzying to me. I understand people have experience working with them for a long time, and you get accustomed.
Still, the industry seems to be taking functionality over user-friendliness and user experience when developing these solutions that help process engineers today. How important is a more user-friendly or user-experience-friendly approach to these kinds of solutions, or will it be important going forward?
I love analogies, so I'll use the analogy of the original PCs when everything was programmed in DOS and was very inconvenient for most users. What happened was just an evolution of demand. People saw massive value in PCs, especially once the internet came along. And then, suddenly, there was so much opportunity that they developed more user-friendly interfaces and software.
Because the end-user was completely aligned and had no experience, they had to make usable things. The epitome would be the phones that we use today. We can do some pretty amazing things. As someone who may have never taken or edited a photo, you can take photos and use filters, making you look quite capable. So I see the industry moving that way.
One of the reasons we haven’t seen that already was that large industries are pretty slow to want to change, to begin with, and quite often, they have highly trained engineers and technicians using that software. So they were capable of using inconvenient software.
Moving Away from the Inconvenient Software
Now, as Industry 4.0 expands and the costs come down, it creates an environment where there aren't enough skilled people to use inconvenient software. The opportunities will now drive the demand for more intuitive and user-friendly interfaces.
I also think the fact that industry 4.0 is almost a collision of IT and IIoT or, say, industry in IT, the knowledge, programming, and experience from the IT world is going to really benefit the OT world because they’ve already done it.
They've done the iPhones, they've done the user-friendly websites and the user interfaces. Technology methodology and skill sets will trickle down into the OT. We've seen that already in Node Red and open-source software and stuff like that. So, it's critical if we want Industry 4.0 and the digitization to grow and expand, it has to be user friendly, and I believe demand will make it so.
There are plenty of messaging apps you can download on your phone, but only a few dominate the world because they're convenient and easy. Facebook took over MySpace, even though it seemed impossible at the time, because it was easier to use. It just had a few things, and it's quite intuitive.
Exciting Things from Industry 4.0
Let's bring some levity into the conversation and ask you what is something really cool you recently witnessed in Industry 4.0?
If I pick one thing, it's got to be the latest, greatest, and most exciting for me. And the epitome of advancement right now that's buzzing around would be Mr. Musk and his Tesla bot, right? I believe he refers to it as Optimus. An opportunity for all of us to geek out a little bit. What's been in the Sci-Fi world since the 70s with Star Wars and stuff like that is to have a bipedal robot that assists and does all the stuff you don't want to do.
Tesla has announced that that is their focus for 2022, and they want to start production in 2023. So it's a combination of automation that we've seen from other companies like Boston Dynamics. They've proven that it can be done as far as the mechanical aspect goes.
Combined with the AI side that Tesla has been working on with their cars, taking that brain from that car is pushing the autonomous capabilities to a place we haven't seen before. And it's unbelievable that they're even talking about pre-production or production of these things within the next year or two.
Ethical Questions Regarding the AI
Sometimes, in podcasts with Elon as a guest, he is quite outspoken about his concerns regarding AI taking over. What is your view on the ethical adoption of AI capabilities, especially when they start being integrated so well into our lives to such an extent, ever more increasingly?
I agree with the concerns; we've already witnessed how it influenced social media or even our mainstream media. We see it when we search for something in a search engine, and then we suddenly see advertisements or news articles related to that. That is AI already at work.
We've already seen it influence politics and the information we absorb and repeat within our communities. So it's an absolute concern. It likely sheds light on Elon's acquisition of Twitter. He wanted a case where he could state that AI will exist, but we must watch it carefully. As far as humanoid robots taking over the world, I don't think that's a very big concern of mine.
It's more about the information side of things and what we're exposed to. And it will likely have to enter into our education system in some senses to make sure that kids are aware of this, how some industries are, and how some use our attention, our time, and our influence.
It's a huge concern, but as with anything, we can make rules and manage it. At the end of the day, we're still responsible for ourselves.
