Digital World and Artificial Intelligence

Words "Digital" and "Artificial Intelligence" have become very popular in the industry today. Every organization is moving towards same. Digital solutions comprise of Industrial Automation, Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence. These concepts existed many decades ago. Then what has really changed and why organizations are doing it now?

 Evolution of these technologies dates back in the history:

• Industry Automation (IA) with control systems started as early as 1920 - early 1930. With factory electrification, control systems were built using conventional relay logic where on-off actions can be taken based on set desired values. Numeric Control (NC) machines started during 1950 and subsequently Computerized Numeric Control (CNC) machines evolved.
• First computing machine dates back to 17th century when the first calculating machine was developed by Blaise Pascal. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace worked on development of analytical engine with punch cards for storing numbers and instruction processing. But the machine could not be completed till Babbage's death in 1871.The first electronic computer was developed and completed for US army in 1946. Von Neumann evolved the idea of storing programs in memory of computer and it is from then computers evolved rapidly.
• The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was first coined at the 1956 Dartmouth conference by John McCarthy and team. There were successful programs on search and reasoning, natural language processing and machine vision systems. The field of AI saw many traction and retardation since its evolution till now.

These technologies (IA, IT and AI) existed for quite sometime and"Digital" is combining these together to generate Business Value now. Industry automation existed in isolation and matured on factory automation with CNC /PLC controllers and Robotic controls. Data collected from sensors in bits/bytes remained within the shop-floor equipment and used to control functions of the equipment. Information Technology existed in engineering design and enterprise applications, automating various business processes thereby increasing productivity, reducing cost and increasing efficiency. But again focused only on business process automation. Artificial Intelligence existed primarily in research circles till more than a decade back some compelling applications, as sending of AI based Rovers - Spirit and Opportunity to Mars in 2003 and Curiosity in 2012 demonstrated the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence. Though these capabilities existed in isolation people started combing these three with advent of the below technologies and it helped to start development of a Digital World.

• Connectivity: Development in communication technologies helped to bring  data / information in isolation in one platform. Network connectivity existed  but development of Egde Gateways to capture data from equipments on shop-floor and bringing it to central processing contributed to build the concept of Internet of Things (IoT). Earlier with limited connectivity options available only for CNC / PLC controlled machines, one cannot get complete information of the shop-floor in one centralized location. So decision making was difficult or localized. Development of communication technologies also helped in providing connectivity to end consumers at low cost, which helped to increase demand of sophisticated or assisted solutions to be developed.
• High Computing Power: With development of high computing CPU and GPU technologies, computing of complex algorithms and vast sets of data became easier. Cost of computation went down and such high computing power is available with many to execute complex scenarios.
• Cloud Computing: Cloud computing, easily scalable and building the capabilities of handling large volumes of both structured and unstructured data fueled exploration of digital solutions. Unstructured data has lot more information than structured data. Earlier we did not have capability of handling same and hence missed lot of information, which can be of business value.

Lack of adequate information was one of the reasons why concepts of AI suffered from producing desired results in history. 

                                           Intelligence  =  Knowledge  +  Information

If we look back to history, concepts of AI demonstrated its capabilities, as knowledge was built but lacked adequate information. It attracted fundings for large projects which were not that successful for lack of information and AI took a back seat. But now with more information made available, capabilities of AI are explored and demonstrated in large projects and hence it's coming at forefront in digital solutions.

For example: Predictive failures existed in industry automation sector for several decades. Vibration technologies, thermo-graphy, fluid analysis with historical data analysis are some of the popular technologies which were already used for predicting failures. But now, in addition to usage of these existing technologies, ambient temperature, production data, historical failures of other similar equipments coupled with high computing power to process large volumes of information made near real-time predictive failure, with higher accuracy and lower cost, a reality. As more information started flowing, it started to become difficult to analyze such high volume of information and build algorithms, where self-learning AI surfaced as a possible solution.

Future of Digital and AI:

The wave of building a digital world with AI has started and will continue for some decades. Organizations started moving towards it and once confidence is further built it will propel growth in this space. 

The future of a digital world might be more of Co-Intelligence. It may look something like

                                        Co-Intelligence = Co-(Knowledge  +  Information)

where      Co-Intelligence = Collaborative Intelligence

                Co-(Knowledge+Information) = Collaborative (Knowledge + Information)

In this world, people and machines will work in a collaborative manner. Development of Brain-Computer Interface technologies will help to share knowledge, information and intelligence between man-machine, machine-machine and man-man. The collaborative knowledge sharing will help to create new solutions altogether.

Communication technologies have been successful in making data available across boundaries /regions wherever required. In addition to data transfer, in future, communication technologies will be able to transfer thoughts, transfer emotions, transfer feelings without anyone speaking about it. Embedded chips in human body are already transmitting human body signals to computers. Days are not far-off when these will be reality.

The architecture of Co-Intelligence (CI) will be quite different as compared to AI of today. Humans will continue to play a bigger role in development of CI. Over the period of human evolution generation-after-generation, we have seen intelligence of human is increasing though physical anatomy of human remained same. Understanding Human Intelligence (HI) is still largely unexplored. Else how can human computing power in milliseconds still control computers with nano-seconds computing power?