Will factories of the future need human workers?

Source: The Globe and Mail

‘We may see a time when there’s a factory and there’s a dog and one worker. The dog will be there to make sure no one touches the machinery and the worker will be there to take care of the dog. There will be more jobs but they will be different.”

This thought-provoking image, from Dr. Richard Soley, Executive Director of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), speaks to a time, not too far away, when industry and the workplace will have been transformed by a revolution that is just getting started.

In the future, products will know they're broken before you do

The rise of the Industrial Internet will lead to business operations that run much more productively, safely and efficiently than ever before; but it also raises important questions about how the subsequent benefits to the economy will help create new and better jobs to replace the types of work that will disappear.

The terms “Industrial Internet” and “Internet of Things” are often used interchangeably, but they’re not exactly the same, Dr. Soley says. In this interview, he explains the difference and why both are going to change the way we work, live, relax, and solve problems.

Founded in 2014, the IIC brings together technology leaders (founding members include GE, Cisco and Intel), market leaders, academia, government and business to develop best practices to grow the Industrial Internet.

Q. What’s the difference between the Industrial Internet and the Internet of Things?

Soley: The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fairly simple idea. It’s taking input from lots of sensors, potentially worldwide, doing real-time predictive analytics and having impact on devices, potentially without human intervention. The Industrial Internet is the application of IoT ideas to industrial systems — to manufacturing, healthcare device integration, jet engine performance management, power distribution and transmission.

Does this distinction matter?

The reason I make this distinction is that if you look at industrial settings there has been little or no impact of Internet thinking. They [industrial systems] typically don’t connect to the Internet; they typically don’t connect to operational technology, to IT.

Should we care about either?

There are plenty of applications for the Internet of Things — from smart cars to Fitbit (a wearable health tracking device) to smart shopping baskets to pill bottles that remind you to take your pills. Those are consumer applications. We’re focusing on B2B applications.

For industry, what’s really happening is the convergence of very cheap and universally available connectivity, very cheap processing power and very cheap analytics power. Put those things together and suddenly it makes sense to take information from lots of sensors, potentially worldwide, to do real-time analytics against benchmarks.

For example?

The analytics could tell you that the fan blade on stage three of a jet engine should be replaced to get another percentage of energy efficiency from the engine.

Are we on the verge of a new way of living and working that’s comparable to the changes brought by the 19th-century industrial revolution?

We certainly are, especially with industrial systems. For example, people like to talk about self-directing cars, but that’s not that interesting in itself. How about self-directing cars that talk to each other and that talk to the road bed, so that the road bed tells you that there’s an accident 10 kilometres ahead, and that there are seven possible detours but you should take the third one because that one has the least traffic? That could be system talking to all the cars in the country, with billions of sensors.

From the consumer perspective, products won’t fail anymore. Or at least, if they’re going to fail, you’ll receive a spare part long before, by mail or by drone.

The product will talk directly to the manufacturer. The difference is that now the product is manufactured and then goes to a wholesaler and then a retailer. But the manufacturer knows more about the product than anyone else. By capturing and benchmarking how it’s used they’ll be able to tell you how it works, what parts need replacing.

Won’t that change the way we work and do BUSINESS, including business deals?

I think that’s pretty likely. Jet engines are my favourite example. If you buy a jet engine, you can buy the engine and servicing for the next 40 years. But you can also lease it, paying for every 100,000 pounds of propulsion for a certain number of hours. And they [the manufacturer] could guarantee you the amount of fuel you’ll use, and if you use more they would pay the difference. Before, the manufacturers didn’t have this kind of data on how their products were used but now [with the Industrial Internet] they do. They can benchmark against millions of hours of engine use.

Won’t this lead to social disruption?

We need to plan for it. In a world of self-driving cars, where the cars know where they are going and where the other cars are, what’s the job of a taxi driver? If you know that a car will pick you up and take you where you’re going and it will drive away and take care of itself, maybe the job of a taxi driver is to find ANOTHER JOB.

We saw this before in the industrial revolution of the 19th century and the Internet revolution of the late 20th century. And we know that in the end, there will more jobs than were lost. But we’d better think about where those jobs are going to be. We may see a time when there’s a factory and there’s a dog and one worker. The dog will be there to make sure no one touches the machinery and the worker will be there to take care of the dog. There will be more jobs but they will be different.