Advanced automation
From AdCiv
 In Western countries many industrial process are becoming highly automated already, but human effort is needed for construction and commissioning as well as maintenance and repair. In developing nations, there is not much automation at all due to labour being so cheap; however this is a great waste of human lives. These self-repairing systems are based on technologies and knowledge that we already possess. No fictional concepts or unattainable artificial intelligence are required to make this happen. We have the ability today to create systems that provide for the global population's basic needs and far beyond, while minimising our impact on the environment – these two aspects are not mutually exclusive.If complicated physical systems were able to be serviced and repaired completely automatically there would be many advantages. There would be higher productivity and efficiency without people in the loop - we tend to slow things down and are error prone; also people could be freed up to do something less menial; and the systems could scale quickly when more capacity is needed.
Machines today, such as industrial machinery, are designed to be looked after and serviced by people, and it would likely need artificial intelligence beyond our current capabilities to maintain or repair these systems completely autonomously. However it is feasible to design them from the outset to be maintained autonomously; designed in a modular fashion with components easily removed and replaced by another machine, and embedded wired or wireless sensors giving the ability to diagnose faults on all significant parts. Many parameters can now be sensed with solid-state or micro sensors, manufactured on tiny silicon chips, which can be embedded within functioning machines. If the signatures from multiple sensors relating to each component function of a machine is known when operating within normal bounds, it provides a method for pin-pointing problems with great accuracy. Vibration, temperature, rotation, pressure, distance, voltage and acceleration as examples. Operations can be assessed in real-time and if there is a failure then the defective parts, or whole assemblies can then be replaced without requiring human intervention. The physical aspects of the machines would also have to be designed with autonomous replacement in mind, with magnetic, RFID or optic cues that can be read by a repair robot, and modular physical design of components allowing them to easily be extracted and replaced. For instance, a gearbox that slots in or out as a single cartridge.It seems likely that a lot of goods and products made today in factories will increasingly be made using smaller-scale flexible computer-controlled manufacturing methods dispersed across communities and even in homes. However larger scale industrial systems are likely to remain for some time to come doing jobs such as mining, material processing, transport infrastructure and specialised manufacturing and construction.
A major advantage of having processes almost completely automated is that the capacity can easily be scaled up. Just as the manufacturing and construction machinery can be repaired automatically, more manufacturing machinery can also be created by machine, as needed.
This capability means we will be able to do things that are simply not possible at the moment. Mega-scale engineering projects become feasible. If a task is complicated, tedious and a great effort we only need to design the system for the job and let it get on with it. Easier said than done of course. But as these systems become more sophisticated, so will the design tools used to create them. People will be able to interface with these complex systems at ever higher levels of abstraction (although there should be plenty who understand the lower levels too). It will be similar to high-level programming languages hiding the lower levels of code - the individual nuts and bolts will be like the zeros and ones of machine code  These complex systems can be developed using the power of open collaborative design, which has the additional benefit of giving transparency to their development. Having the industrial infrastructure fully automated means it can be easily scaled up to provide everything that the global population requires with ultimate flexibility, and it frees people up to do things that people are good at and want to do.  These systems needs to be carefully controlled by people. We will always need to understand how they work, at every level, and they will need to be monitored. Some people wonder whether we will get to a stage where the machines are so sophisticated, and we have relied on them for so long, that no-one will actually know how they work, and therefore we will not be fully in control of them. The reality is that there will always be people interested in this sort of thing - engineers, scientists and geeks in general. They want to know how to make things and understand how they work. There always have been technically-minded people, and luckily there always will be.
People will need to improve the designs and make sure they are safe and efficient. We must always remain part of the loop in terms of ultimate control. It is highly likely that we will develop computer-controlled systems more capable at certain tasks than we are, in fact we already have done, but this trend will inevitably continue until there is very little in terms of systems control that can't be done better by a computer. But however sophisticated these systems become they are still just tools for our service. |
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