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H OW TO AVO I D TH E H Y P E
You haven’t heard of AIoT? The industrial digitalisation process is in full swing, and kicking up a lot of dust in the process. So much dust that it’s sometimes hard to see the way forward to our ultimate goal. Couldn’t it all be simpler? You haven’t heard of AIoT?! But you must know IIoT, right? OK, but you can, at least, define exactly how a neural network works? And how knowledgeable are you when it comes to the cloud?
Anyone who spends their professional life in automation technology will inevitably be confronted with a wide range of different technologies over the years. Some of them will be relevant to us, but others less so. Some are genuinely transformative, while others have their fifteen minutes of fame before being replaced – anyone remember ActiveX? This is part of our jobs. Many, including myself, have chosen a career in the technical field because of the constant change we get to experience. Progress makes our everyday lives interesting and varied. It allows us to solve the technical challenges in increasingly elegant ways, and sometimes opens up brand-new business models. However, this progress can come at a cost. It forces us to continuously keep our toolbox up to date and to invest time in understanding new technologies and evaluating how important they are to us. “A rolling stone gathers no moss!” This certainly couldn’t be more true than in the technical field. However, the information age has brought about something that makes evaluating new technologies more difficult for all of us, and that something is hype!
We operate in an industry dominated by tech-savvy people. This clientèle in particular is easy to impress with exaggerated technical fantasies. Or, to put it another way, if you spent your youth rooting for Geordi La Forge to reinitialise the USS Enterprise’s dilithium matrix to increase the efficiency of the warp core, today you will be keen to see AI algorithms in the Internet of Things enhance manufacturing efficiency. Our affinity for technology and the possibilities it opens up to us creates a perfect breeding ground for hype. We are seeing increasingly often that technology trends are overloaded with unrealistic expectations. The terms mentioned at the beginning of the article, such as IoT, machine learning and the cloud, are great examples of this. A quote from Dan Ariely of Duke University resonates well here: “Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it...” The hype surrounding digitalisation is so strong that virtually every company in our industry feels compelled to talk about it.
