Wednesday, January 24, 2018

If you build it, who wins what?

From the movie - Field of Dreams
Digital is the creation of value from connecting people, data and devices.
You can't create value for a device (that would require conscious machines and we are still some distance from that). You can't create value for data.
You can only create value for people.
People feel stuff.
If I instrument machines to automate their optimisation, their effectiveness, extending their lives, the machinery really doesn't care. It feels nothing.
The engineer who now doesn't have to tweak it to balance loads or speed up the run every few moments, or take time out to order parts, and fit them - she's happier. She now has more time to think about how this machine could be improved, where else a machine could be applied, what other aspects of the business around her could be automated, for example.
Creating value for people should be an absolutely natural part of any digital development (and by extension, any AI deployment).
Who wins what?
Only when we find that value and build to deliver it do we create technological solutions that matter.
The rest is just built on the assumption 'they will come'. And we now have much evidence that this is the road to expensive failure.
I read somewhere once how the average number of members of online message boards is a somewhat lonely, one.  They built, but nobody came.

FasterFuture.blogspot.com

The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?