This is from last week’s newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on the envelope icon or here.
The media are going all things AI crazy. I see it on LinkedIn, Twitter, rss newsfeed. Then I see some manufacturing specific references discussing autonomous plants.
On a recent podcast episode, Seth Godin just spoke about the two ends of a spectrum of everything on our online or human touch. He was talking about retail business, but I thought about the autonomous plant.
First, we technologists do things because we can. You see it all over Silicon Valley might’ve a guy is just do 20 we can do this and let’s do this.
We did that in manufacturing and production automation. I talked with the CEO of a company who was perhaps an instigator of the expansion of digital automation technology in production plants, and he remarked that a an unfortunate byproduct of this automation is that we took the operator out of the plant and placed them in a cinderblock building, darkened with computer screens in front of them previously the operator would come to work walk through the plant and listen and smell and could say everything seems right or something smells a little funny we better check out that valve over there which leads to what can we really really have an autonomous plant or manufacturing facility?
What do we lose by removing people from a facility? We lose those analog capabilities of sight and smell and hearing. we lose the creativity of two or more people looking at a problem, and figuring out how to solve it. machine learning might be able to tune a machine, but can it retune it when it inevitably goes out of tune? Can it think of a better machine or a better way to put things together a better way to serve the customer in fact, does an autonomous plant even realize about a customer?
Some things to think about as we discuss the powers of chatGPT, or other artificial intelligence Technologies, that may come along I think people are still important
For more on large language models and ChatGPT, I recommend Cal Newport’s podcast discussion and Stephen Wolfram’s discussion. These discussions probe the reality behind the hype and dispel myths about AI taking over the world–or your job.
For more on large language models and ChatGPT, I recommend Cal Newport’s podcast discussion and Stephen Wolfram’s discussion. These discussions probe the reality behind the hype and dispel myths about AI taking over the world–or your job.
I’ve uploaded a new podcast discussing a few themes from my recent webinar–disruption, innovation, people.
