Dell Technologies Research On Human Machine Partnership Report Part Two

Dell Technologies Research On Human Machine Partnership Report Part Two

Human-Machine Partnership. I love that phrase. It is in the title of the recent research report from the Institute for the Future and Dell Technologies. I wrote about the technology side of the report in my last post. This post will highlight the human and partnership sides of the report.

Takeaway: The way we work with technology in the near future will evolve into a partnership that can enhance human training and education building a workforce that is effective and focused on continual learning.

Challenge: The optimism in the report needs to be tempered by the question—will this only benefit the few self-motivated youth and those whose parents push them? How can we remake our institutional education (which is now global) such that we can provide mentors and a different way of motivating kids and young adults (as well as us old guys) into continual and self-paced learning?

From the report:

Recent conversations, reports, and articles about the intersection of emerging technologies and society have tended to promote one of two extreme perspectives about the future: the anxiety-driven issue of technological unemployment or the optimistic view of tech-enabled panaceas for all social and environmental ills. Perhaps a more useful conversation would focus on what the new relationship between technology and society could look like, and what needs to be considered to prepare accordingly. By framing the relationship between humans and machines as a partnership, we can begin to build capacity in machines to improve their understanding of humans, and in society and organizations, so that more of us are prepared to engage meaningfully with emerging technologies.

However, it would be a fallacy to assume that technology is making human effort redundant. It’s doubtful that computers will have fully mastered the fundamental, instinctive skills of intuition, judgment, and emotional intelligence that humans value by 2030. Over the next decade, partnering with machines will help humans transcend their limitations.

Human-machine partnerships will enable people to find and act on information without interference of emotions or external bias, while also exercising human judgment where appropriate. They’ll learn to team up with technologies integrated with machine learning tools to help activate and deactivate the resources they need to manage their daily lives. And they’ll partner with AR/VR technologies to develop necessary work skills, blending experiential media with human judgement to perform well at work.

Their ability to evaluate talent will also be bolstered by VR/AR technology, which will increase managers’ ability to evaluate a worker’s aptitude for gaining new knowledge or learning new skills and applying this knowledge to a new scenario.

By 2030, populations’ needs and resources will be orchestrated by self-learning, digital technologies, allowing humans to take the role of digital resource conductors. Technology will work as an extension of people, helping orchestrate, manage, and automate many day-to-day activities. And because the technology will be woven into everyone’s lives (some will even be implanted), and personalized to the individual, some needs will be met often before people even realize they have them. These digital technologies will be integrated with machine learning to create a population of digital orchestration systems, harnessing technology to arrange and direct resources to produce a desired result.

By 2030, many will be savvy digital orchestra conductors, relying on their suite of personal technologies, including voice-enabled connected devices, wearables, and implantables; to infer intent from their patterns and relationships, and activate and deactivate resources accordingly.

By 2030, expectations of work will reset and the landscape for organizations will be redrawn, as the process of finding work gets flipped on its head. As an extension of what is often referred to as the ‘gig economy’ today, organizations will begin to automate how they source work and teams, breaking up work into tasks, and seeking out the best talent for a task.

As the transfer of knowledge will be increasingly offloaded to emerging technologies, individuals will shoulder the burden of using these new technologies to acquire necessary skills to demonstrate proficiency. As a result, people will need to know how to access information and learn through immersive and experimental media such as AR and VR. (Big fear, can we restructure education so that we lessen the divide between digital haves and have nots? Or do we continue to stratify society?

INDIVIDUAL SKILLS & TRAITS

  • Contextualized intelligence: nuanced understanding of culture, society, business, and people
  • Entrepreneurial mindset: applying creativity, learning agility, and an enterprising attitude to find workarounds and circumvent constraints
  • Personal brand cultivation: a searchable and favorable digital identity as basic work hygiene
  • Automation literacy: the nimble ability to integrate lightweight automation tools into one’s own work and home life
  • Computational sensemaking: ability to derive meaning from blended machine and human-based outputs

ORGANIZATIONAL SKILLS & TRAITS

  • Business-driven security: embed security as a business strategy
  • Eliminate latencies: exceed consumer expectations for real-time delivery
  • Algorithmic branding: ensure algorithms align with organizational values
  • Diversifying value of work: reset assumptions behind the value of work
  • Inspire innovation: incent workers to deviate from machine-learned systems

 

Dell Technologies Research On Human Machine Partnership Report Part Two

Dell Anticipates Tech Trends to 2030 Seeing Human Machine Partnerships

In 2030 every organization will be a technology organization and as such businesses need to start thinking today about how to future-proof their infrastructure and workforce, according to a report published by Dell Technologies. The research, led by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) alongside 20 technology, academic and business experts from across the globe, looks at how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality and cloud computing, will transform our lives and how we work over the next decade. The report, titled ‘The Next Era of Human-Machine Partnerships‘ also offers insight on how consumers and businesses can prepare for a society in flux.

Interesting thing about this report is that it is not simply Dell’s technology or market strategy wrapped in the guise of a “research” report like the typical analyst job.

The report forecasts that emerging technologies, supported by massive advancements in software, big data and processing power, will reshape lives. Society will enter a new phase in its relationship with machines, which will be characterized by:

  • Even greater efficiency and possibility than ever before, helping humans transcend our limitations
  • Humans as “digital conductors” in which technology will work as an extension of people, helping to better direct and manage daily activities
  • Work chasing people, in which by using advanced data-driven matchmaking technologies, organizations can find and employ talent from across the world
  • People learning “in the moment,” as the pace of change will be so rapid that new industries will be created and new skills will be required to survive

Dell Technologies commissioned the study to help companies navigate an uncertain world and prepare for the future. Today, digital disruption is ruthlessly redrawing industries. For the first time in modern history, global leaders can’t predict how their industry will fare further down the line. According to Dell’s Digital Transformation Index, 52 percent of senior decision makers across 16 countries have experienced significant disruption to their industries as a result of digital technologies. And nearly one in two businesses believe there’s a possibility their company will become obsolete within the next three to five years.

Not your usual analyst firm, Institute for the Future (IFTF) is an independent, nonprofit 501(c)(3) strategic research and educational organization celebrating nearly 50 years of forecasting experience. The core of our work is identifying emerging trends and discontinuities that will transform global society and the global marketplace. The Institute for the Future is based in Palo Alto, California.

IFTF relied on its decades-long study on the future of work and technology, in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, and the opinions and ideas generated during an all-day facilitated workshop with a diverse set of experts from across the globe.

They studied robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, augmented reality and virtual reality, and cloud computing with the goal of projecting the impacts of these technologies by 2030. I had the opportunity to talk with Liam Quinn, sr. vice president and CTO of Dell Technologies about this report and he added comments about the Internet of Things. More on that interview in my next reflection of the report.

“Never before has the industry experienced so much disruption. The pace of change is very real, and we’re now in a do-or-die landscape. To leap ahead in the era of human-machine partnerships, every business will need to be a digital business, with software at its core,” said Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer, Dell. “But organizations will need to move fast and build capacity in their machines, ready their infrastructure and enable their workforce in order to power this change.”

“We’ve been exposed to two extreme perspectives about machines and the future: the anxiety-driven issue of technological unemployment or the over optimistic view that technology will cure all our social and environmental ills,” said Rachel Maguire, research director, Institute for the Future. “Instead we need to focus on what the new relationship between technology and people could look like and how we can prepare accordingly. If we engage in the hard work of empowering human-machine partnerships to succeed, their impact on society will enrich us all.”

Other report highlights include:

  • In 2030 humans’ reliance on technology will evolve into a true partnership with humans, bringing skills such as creativity, passion and an entrepreneurial mindset. This will align with the machines’ ability to bring speed, automation and efficiencies, and the resulting productivity will allow for new opportunities within industries and roles.
  • By 2030 personalized, integrated artificial intelligence (AI) assistants will go well beyond what assistants can do now. They’ll take care of us in predictive and automated ways.
  • Technology won’t necessarily replace workers, but the process of finding work will change. Work will cease to be a place but a series of tasks. Machine learning technologies will make individuals’ skills and competencies searchable, and organizations will pursue the best talent for discrete tasks.
  • An estimated 85 percent of jobs in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. The pace of change will be so rapid that people will learn “in-the-moment” using new technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality. The ability to gain new knowledge will be more valuable than the knowledge itself.

Exploring the technology areas:

Robotics—Buoyed by their commercial success, the adoption of robots will extend beyond manufacturing plants and the workplace. Family robots, caregiving robots, and civic robots will all become commonplace as deep learning improves robots’ abilities to empathize and reason.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning—According to Michelle Zhou, an expert in AI, development can be thought of in three stages. The first is recognition intelligence—algorithms that recognize patterns; followed by cognitive intelligence—machines that make inferences from data; with the final stage being virtual human beings. It is plausible that, by 2030, we will enter the second stage in AI as this technology progresses.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality—Despite the difference, both technologies represent a fundamental shift in information presentation because they allow people to engage in what Toshi Hoo, Director of IFTF’s Emerging Media Lab, calls “experiential media” as opposed to representative media. The information layer that both technologies create will accelerate the melding of digital and physical identities, with digital drails and traces forming a digital coating over individuals’ physical environments.

Cloud Computing—It’s important to recognize that Cloud Computing isn’t a place, it’s a way of doing IT. It is already in wide use. For example, Chitale Dairy (in India) launched a ‘cow to cloud’ initiative in which each cow is fitted with RFID tags to capture data that is held in the cloud. The relevant analysis of this data is then sent to the local farmers via SMS and the web, to alert farmers when they need to change the cows’ diet, arrange vaccinations, etc. The timely delivery of this information is increasing the cows’ yield, supporting local farmers, whose livelihoods depend on the dairy farms, and enabling Chitale to manage a part of the supply chain which is normally fraught with uncertainty.

You can also check out the Dell blog.

Let’s Tour Dell EMS IoT Booth At Its User Conference

Let’s Tour Dell EMS IoT Booth At Its User Conference

Dell EMS Internet of Things (IoT) group assembled a mini supply chain as its booth at the user conference Dell EMS World in Las Vegas in May. At the October Dell EMS World in Austin, these were put together as an ice cream factory and distribution, and the booth featured an ice cream machine. I sure could have used an ice cream by the time I got through all the exhibits.

The Dell IoT Gateway was the common denominator of the exhibit tying everything together.

The first station features construction. Here are a couple of guys trying out the DAQRI augmented reality helmets. I had the opportunity to try these in Hannover. A really cool application of AR.

They are looking at a combination of the construction (see the red “steel” framework) and drawings that show the layout of electrical conduit, HVAC ducting, and other details. As a construction worker, they can get a feel of where things go, as well as spot interferences the designer missed.

This station showed product on its way to market through sensing and communication from Nokia.

Below is a layout of the Emerson process manufacturing system.

They brought actual pipe, pump, motor, instruments, wirelessHART communication. No, it didn’t make ice cream.

This station featured IMS Evolve–an application that brings sensor data into the cloud and provides track and trace, as well as other analytics, assuring the safety of the food product through the supply chain from the point of view of proper temperature.

Don’t forget security! Here is a photo of a physical security video system from V5.

The Dell Gateway is an edge device capable of accumulating data from the disparate sources, performing storage and analysis at the edge then sending information to the cloud for further analysis.  It seems that everywhere I go, the “edge” is the place where innovation is centered right now. This simple demo showed the power of the edge.

Internet of Things At Dell EMC World

Internet of Things At Dell EMC World

Enterprise begins to meet operations from the enterprise side of technology at Dell World—now Dell EMC World following the mammoth acquisition of EMC by Dell last year–via the Internet of Things. That followed Michael Dell leading the company into privately owned territory.

Michael Dell himself prominently mentioned manufacturing and Internet of Things (IoT) during his keynotes of 2015 and 2016. Perhaps not as much this year at the first totally combined conferences held May 8-11 in Las Vegas. But there was so much enterprise product news and so little time.

Dell also stressed the success of combining the companies as well as making clear the new organization structure of Dell Technologies—the company name—consisting of Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream, and VMware.

Digital Transformation formed the theme message of the week. This conversation consists of business transformation and applications changes rapidly taking place now. Part of the transformation is formed by IT Transformation requiring adoption and assimilation of a new generation of servers, applications, and technologies. Millennials’ expectations (and maybe also some of us “old” guys) fire the Workforce Transformation now building. One study found that 82% of millennials would quit or not hire in initially based upon the level of technology tools offered. Finally all this digital infrastructure, the cloud, and communications are fueling the Security Transformation.

Of course, Dell Technologies is positioned to lead in all of these. Michael Dell pointed out that the company is the leader in 15 Gartner Magic Quadrants.

Internet of Things

But we are really here to discuss the point of intersection of all this IT stuff with Operations Technology—the Internet of Things. Dell EMC IoT leader Andy Rhodes received prominent positioning during the Day Two Keynotes. As an aside, the Day Three technology keynotes blew away any really cool tech keynotes I’ve seen in the past. Must be nice to have marketing dollars.

By the way, at 5’10” I think of myself of at least average height. Talking with some of the IoT team leaders made me feel like a refugee from the Island of Lilliput. Andy Rhodes, Jason Shepherd, and Keven Terwilliger are 6’5”, 6’’7”, and 6’8” (if memory serves).

News Summary:
• New VMware Pulse IoT Center, Dell EMC IoT Technology Advisory Services simplify IoT deployments
• New IoT partnerships with Atos, Bosch and more
• Dell EMC and VMware, founding members of new EdgeX Foundry Linux Foundation project, join 50 other companies to build open framework for edge computing

New IoT Products and Services

Simplified “Things” Management – The new VMware Pulse IoT Center is a secure IoT infrastructure management solution that will enable customers to have complete control of their connected things. VMware Pulse IoT Center will help customers to more efficiently manage, operate, scale and protect their IoT projects from the edge to the cloud. Dell will be offering VMware Pulse IoT Center as the preferred enterprise management and monitoring solution for Dell Edge Gateways. By plugging Pulse IoT Center into the new EdgeX Foundry, VMware will be able to offer system and device management for the EdgeX ecosystem.

IoT Advisory Services – IoT Technology Advisory Service is a new consulting offer from Dell EMC Services to help organizations determine the key capabilities and architecture required to leverage IoT data (e.g., sensors, beacons, gateways, mobile phones, wearables, connected devices). This information can be used for initiatives such as optimizing key operational processes, reducing compliance and security risks, uncovering new revenue opportunities and creating more compelling customer engagements.

Open Source Framework for Interoperable Edge Computing – The Linux Foundation recently launched EdgeX Foundry, an open source software project chartered to build a common framework and surrounding reference platform for edge computing. It will drive interoperability between proprietary value-added applications and existing connectivity standards. It was started by a community of more than 50 companies such as AMD, Analog Devices, Dell EMC, Foghorn and VMware to enable an ecosystem of plug-and-play components that can be combined to quickly create secure and scalable IoT solutions. Dell contributed more than a dozen microservices and over 125,000 lines of source code under Apache 2.0 to seed the project, additional contributions are already underway from other members. EdgeX Foundry is architected to operate on any hardware, on any operating system and with microservices developed in any application environment for maximum scale.

I have previously written about the Open Source EdgeX Foundry. This, I feel is the most significant of the news. The VMware announcement shows the coming together of the various parts of the Dell Technologies portfolio. People studying IoT for implementation in their companies are considering whether going with a consultant is the wise thing to do. Dell EMC now offers that alternative.

Curated Partnerships

Dell has carefully curated a group of IoT software and services partners through the Dell IoT Solutions Partner and Dell EMC Partner Programs. Many partners have deep, proven expertise in industry-specific IoT challenges, and can help with everything from managing multiprotocol data sources to security to analytics. New partners recently added to the program include Atos, Bosch, GreatBay Software, ForgeRock, IOTech, Mocana and Modius.

Today’s key IoT partner news includes:
• Dell and Bosch have jointly developed an Industry 4.0 jump start kit to help customers implement IoT projects quickly to realize faster ROI. The kit consists of multiple Bosch XDK sensors, a Dell Edge Gateway, ready-to-go use-cases, cloud integration and software, all preconfigured.
• Atos and Dell EMC are working together to build an IoT service management framework, Atos Codex IoT Services, to allow customers to be assured that all users can continuously create value from their connected devices.

[DISCLAIMER: Dell Technologies provides some compensation to support my work. It does not edit what I do.]

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