september 27, 2024
The biggest hype surrounding AI seems to be over – at least according to my trustworthy LinkedIn index (which means scrolling through my feed for a few minutes every now and then). A couple months ago every other post was AI this and ML that, but now there was only one post mentioning AI. Even though AI was supposed to revolutionize everything in a matter of weeks.
But AI is no different from any other trend or system for that matter. All sorts of snake oil salesmen tend to crawl out of their hideouts to ride the current wave promising that this time around putting garbage in doesn’t result in garbage out. These inflated expectations inevitably led to a collective hangover as AI wasn’t as easy to implement as it was marketed.
The unfortunate truth about AI is that it is only as good as the data it is trained with. The reason why ChatGPT doesn’t do our dishes or laundry yet is because it doesn’t have enough data to accomplish these tasks (also it doesn’t have a physical form). As the LLM is trained with data originating from the Internet, it is good at making recipes and such that are widely available, but asking it to do something more sophisticated probably only causes confusion. You can still ask it how to do it, even though it can’t do it, and it’ll give you instructions.
Our AI pilots have faced the same issue: putting garbage in leads to getting garbage out. These GIGO failures are, in my opinion, the biggest reason why AI pilots remain only pilots and don’t progress further also causing frustration and delaying the start of possible successes. Filtering and enriching data takes either blood, sweat and tears from yourself or you pay a hefty sum for an expert to do it, which seems unreasonable even though it is the most crucial part of the project.
Our first pilot was to predict the need for materials in our stock, which was basically doomed to fail from the beginning, but we had to do something so I could present the case after the AI training course. We knew the data we had was incomplete, but still we managed to create a model that is useful once we have better data from our production. And this should become reality soon as we are currently ramping up our new MES.
The second pilot (also a demo for a course) was also doomed to fail as once again the data set was incomplete – it is currently waiting on my desk to receive better labeling and links between the tables. Still the idea of a predictive maintenance algorithm for our production is so revolutionary that we’ll continue to work on the case. And we hope that the new MES is more willing to hand over the data it possesses in a useful form. The MES data together with the data from the machine monitoring system should give us an actual possibility to accomplish this.
The third pilot relates to ML. We are trying to create an algorithm that recognizes gaskets from cuttings and learns how to pick them up with a cobot picker. This is probably a longer-term project but at least we have created a data set and designed a picker suitable for our production that is currently being tested. The algorithm hasn’t progressed much due to lack of resources, but hopefully we’ll have something to brag about in the coming months.
In addition to these pilots, we have plenty of AI ideas in the pipeline. The lowest hanging fruit is of course implementing an internal Copilot within our office environment. It is, however, such a powerful tool that we want to ensure that it doesn’t cause harm. It doesn’t obey borders, so we must educate it to do so before letting it answer any questions. Luckily, patience is our middle name.
But hopefully sooner rather than later we’ll have a ChatTTG tool to help you with your sealing issues to provide you with Smarter Sealing for a Safer Tomorrow. But before that happens you can always contact us the traditional way.
december 2, 2020
In my earlier blogs I have covered how technology could change the world we live in. Some technologies, such as P2X make our economy more sustainable. Some may lead to revolutionary changes in our living in the long run. One of these is Artificial Intelligence, that I talked about a long while ago.
You have probably already heard the promises of AI, seen the Terminator movie saga and cringed at stumbling robots. Imitating human thinking and physiology isn’t easy, and we don’t have millions of years to develop our technology. Still the progress in the last 20 years has been rapid and is probably accelerating towards the future.
As AI based applications develop, more human labor can be replaced by machines. Or actually will be, as companies search the best bang for their buck. Machines don’t need rest or salary as we humans do. This then raises the question that if the amount of work available declines over time, should all of us still find something to do as a living?
The discussion of this topic often gets political, as it in practice requires policy making. But objectively speaking, it is about how we redistribute the work. Distributing the workload evenly and shortening the hours gets some to rise to their hind legs. Dealing with up to 75 % unemployment rate would also get things heated in the society.
Some proposals include the use of basic income with a separate currency that devalues with every transaction to avoid over inflation. Allowing employees to invest in the machinery that replaces them could also be part of the solution.
Finding a solution isn’t going to be easy, as it requires open discussion in all the levels of society. Open discussion seems to be hard to find these days as people are yelling to each other from their own standpoints in social media. And this type of culture has gradually moved to politics as well.
As the world is changing at an accelerating rate, we need to find ways to negotiate and co-operate on a local and global scale to tackle the challenges we face. Rooting deeper into our positions and (blindly) nostalgizing the past don’t help when we are moving forward.
As Heraclitus put it a couple millennia ago: “There is nothing permanent except change”, and that’s one of the principles we at TT Gaskets obey. If you want to know more about the change we are planning and implementing, you can meet us at virtual Alihankinta from December 8th to 10th. We are happy to open discussion about your needs.