| | February 20178CIOReviewThe "Cambrian" Robotic Explosion has Begun! By David Tamayo, CIO, DCS CorporationIn the early 1990's Juarez, Mexico, I was interviewing local management of a large multinational corporation who assembled large television sets. For each TV, there were 3,200 people in a line assembly each earning $0.57 per hour and when my partner asked "Why isn't this entire process automated?" their answer was an obvious "Right now automation has a break-even ROI of 20 years, and Mexicans are a lot cheaper. Once that changes, we'll automate." The newly elected U.S. president won with a promise of bringing back the manufacturing jobs that were lost to such cheap foreign labor. Yet, what many (including him) do not realize is that bringing back manufacturing will not bring back the jobs because those jobs will be automated.Computers, robots, and what is generally referred to as "automation" is now one single undistinguishable thing. In addition, without getting into a philosophical discussion on what intelligence is or is not, we can probably agree that this thing (computers, robots, and automation) is getting smarter, faster than ever, in a trend with no end in sight. A single day does not go by without news about advancements in automation threatening jobs. For example, in the last few months Uber deployed automated cars for their taxi-type of service in Pittsburg, PA which is soon expected to eliminate driving jobs. It also successfully tested an $80K truck robot by delivering 50,000 beers without problems. In early 2016, Tesla's automated driver appears to have killed a driver, while by year's end it had saved many from terrible accidents including the driving of an incapacitated man to the hospital. Traffic experts claim that if every car on the road today were to use current self-driving technology, the 40,000 yearly U.S. deaths caused by human driver error would go down to nearly zero. As car insurance company, wouldn't you fight to do away with human drivers?There have been some factors, which had been holding back robots until recently. They included the amount of computing power required for decision-making algorithms and intelligence, battery technology for independence of movement, miniaturization costs, and hardware costs. All continue to come down in price. In addition, with more recent ability to be connected, the internet of things (IoT) has added yet more abilities to automation by allowing automatic updates and upgrades without human interference.When IBM's Deep Blue beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in the 90s, experts said, "Well that's just brute force. The computer doesn't understand things like natural language." Not many years after that, IBM's Watson beat the world champions in the natural language IN MY OPINIONDavid Tamayo
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