Smart machines — 4 Basic Categories
What are they? And how they affects us?
How many smart devices are in your home? 10? 15? According to Deloitte report from June 2021, the average household in America has 25 connected devices. These machines are becoming an integral part of our daily life.
We love using these smart devices, they make my life a bit easier and fun, but do we need to understand these machines and its impact on our lives in the coming decades? I think yes, we need basic understanding of this emerging new species. If machines are going to diagnose my cancer report and suggest whether I take chemotherapy or go for tumor removal, I better know how it works. If machines are going to drive my kids to school, I better make sure that they are safe.
What is a smart machine? What varieties do they come in?
Smart machine:
They are made up of ‘Body’ — Hardware and ‘Brain’ — Software (Artificial intelligence).
Body is a physical structure that gives us an interface to interact with. It also includes sensors that consume input like voice, text, images. For example: Fitness tracker includes sensors for detecting heartbeat and tracking GPS location. More sensors mean more parameters a machine consumes. They are equivalent to our senses (sight, hearing, touch etc.) but much more accurate. These sensors also work together and feed into the central brain. In mumbo-jumbo terms it’s called Internet of Things (IoT).
Brain is the software that does all the behind the scenes work. They come in a whole spectrum of varied complexity. They vary from a simple algorithm that analyses your heartbeats and locations and gives you ‘Achievement’ badges on your fitness tracker to the self-driving cars that make decisions on your behalf that can impact your life. These algorithms (or programs) are called AI algorithms, neural network, deep neural network and other terms that don’t mean much to the people who are not working in that specialized field. Main function of the brain is to find patterns and/or to do probabilistic determination.
The fast pace innovations of these sensors (body) and the software (brain) is making these machines more powerful everyday. Iteration cycles are short and hence evolution is pretty fast.
Using our age old classic quadrants (2x2), these smart machines can be divided in four categories based on these two parameters. Number of sensors and software complexity.
1. Simple body and simple brain:
Example: Fitness tracker, Smart thermostats, Security systems
Role: Assist an individual in their task
Functions: They gather a few parameters, churn it through a simple algorithm and give us suggestive results as ‘get-up and walk’ or take simple decisions like ‘Start heating when humans are at home’.
Impact on us: They are facilitators to our daily lives. They provide a bit more convenience and help us in better decision making. These machines assist, but humans are in control. We make decisions. If you are not going to get-up and walk, the machine is not going to withhold a candybar from you that you are thinking of devouring.
2. Simple body and complex brain:
Example: AlphaGo, Google home, Siri, Amazon Alexa, IBM Watson
Role: Take a decision for an individual
Functions: They have very few sensors, but their software is quite complex.
Impact on us: Their complex algorithm helps us delegate some of our tasks. They help us in reducing our mental fatigue. They can help doctors to diagnose disease or book my next appointment to the physiotherapist. This is the fastest growing segment of the smart machines as there is very little hardware cost and new features can be added by installing new versions over the internet. Consumers won’t even notice and they will get new features and functionalities.
3. Complex body and simple brain:
Example: Smart parking lots, Smart City, Environment trackers
Role: Assist community in simple tasks
Functions: Many sensors of few varieties are deployed in a geographical area. These sensors collect tons of data, and software aggregates this data to provide simple answers or to find patterns
Impact on us: Let’s say “City of Buzztown” installs hundreds of sensors around downtown that tracks parking spots, traffic patterns, air quality etc. All these sensors feed into an aggregator and help citizens to find empty parking spots or running routes. Another example: Let’s say one is studying caribou migration in the Canadian north. They can put sensors on these caribou and track their migration patterns and correlate with other local environment patterns. These machines help us collect data on a much wider scale, aggregate them and find patterns. These types of connected smart machines will have a huge impact on how goods and people move around the world.
4. Complex body and complex brain:
Example: Autonomous vehicle, Mars 2020 Perseverance Lander/Rover
Role: Completes a complex physical task on behalf of an individual
Functions: They take decisions and perform actions on our behalf. We humans need to provide a desirable outcome and machines will take care of things.
Impact on us: We will delegate complex repetitive tasks to them. They will free us from doing the grunt work. Industrial robots did similar work for years in the confines of factories, but these new breeds of machines are very adaptable to changing circumstances and will be able to operate around humans in their day to day activities. These machines will change the dynamics of the workforce and our economy.
Conclusion:
These machines are here to stay and they are going to have an impact on every aspect of our lives. Our challenge will be to find the balance so we can coexist and thrive with this new species.
If creatures from today’s world travel to 2050 and look into the world with today’s eyes, they will see one harmonized world run by a man (person) and a machine.
“The creatures outside looked from machine to man, and from man to machine, and from machine to man again; but already it will be impossible to say which is which.”
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