The Road To Automation 4.0

From Ancient automation of the 1st century BC to modern advanced AI

As of the date published — there are just 3 months left for the year 2020 to come and it just feels like Yesterday that 2010 was a thing and all of a sudden, a whole decade has been passed and the time we are finally gonna be entering the era of “Industry 4.0” is just 3 steps away (if we haven’t entered already)

So today, we are going to be taking a look back at the journey technology has gone throughout these years — or more specifically, the Evolution Of Automation.

Before there were these highly advanced algorithm-driven Automation technologies, such as Deep Learning with Neural Network and Machine Learning algorithm based shopping, video or Television platforms or these Home Automation Virtual Assistants (as a friend, that will listen to you all the time)

The early forms of Automation looked somewhat like THIS

In 1st century A.D., Hero of Alexandria designed the first vending machine–it dispensed holy water after insertion of a coin

Because Humans were the ones who were naturally chosen to be smart and the tradeoff of being a smart species or more specifically becoming a civilization — there comes the need to survive together, and to survive together, there comes the need to be efficient. Meaning to produce more than the actual Human Labor put, and as a matter of fact, humans were not the strongest of all Animals. So definitely at that time, the one and only priority of human civilization were to survive at all costs.

Luckily, as a result of the intelligence, Humans got the gift of Technology which allowed them to build Tools one by another.

Some of the many early samples of Tools that filled the gap of Humans’ limited strength and resources were the following —

Ancient Catapults

Which was the missile launcher of the 350 BC and instead of rockets

And THE

FIRST VENDING Machine of Holy Water

Alright enough history lessons, now let’s get to the topic.

Unlike these, the first generation of Automation (also called Automation 1.0) which relied solely on Mechanism and Human Energy, after we advanced to agriculture, these systems became more and more sophisticated with that in mind to — Produce with as little labor as possible. And the Industrial Revolution took place, we had to master how to extract more energy — and we did get better at it.

So as we started getting better at extracting energy, the more we put started putting it in action, such as building engines to go to point A to point B, or Tractors and mechanical engine-driven farming tools. And on the more industrial side, there’s the need to have more sophisticated machinery systems, because, at that time, industrial priority was to produce more to yield the maximum margin of profit.

This reasonably evolved machines to operate less on Human Energy but more on extracted energy but surely those were just the chemical resources because Nuclear energy was yet to come and fusion is still yet to show up.

That was the era when Humanity barely just stepped into Robotics but not quite mastered it yet. Because the whole machinery infrastructure relied on a huge chunk of human input and which without, it would be non-operational. And these are the 2nd Generation of Automation or Automation 2.0.

Like I mentioned above, Tools that were invented under 2nd generation of Automation, all had lacked the most important thing, To be able to operate without any human input or to the least, the operation directed by a logical system.

Yeah, the past 2 decades were the era when industries started getting completely switched to getting jobs done by Robotics and also one of the first times ever to implement ta logical system to drive the whole automation system. Driving these mechanisms by a computer through a logical software, allowed determined operations by mathematical precision but the parts of AI such as Deep and Machine learning still didn’t happen to be a BIG thing back then but would be in just ruse until the next decade, which resulted in, although by writing programs using statistics and mathematical precision, we could minimize loss but were nowhere close to generating statements and objects for these programs without the help of human input along with the machines themselves.

This IS the 3rd Generation of Automation or Automation 3.0. It helped to make productions a lot faster but still was limited by having the development completely dependent on Human Intelligence.

But what if we could have Independent production, Development and interaction systems hosted entirely by a logical system without any sort of Human interaction needed and could use huge DATA to predict the weather or to predict the stock market or to solve some insanely complicated problems, by the ease of just pressing a button?

Can we do it?

Well, friend — we have already stepped into doing it. And all of these being a reality is close than you think. And when these things do come to exist, it will revolutionalize the industry the 4th time, so enter Industry 4.0 which holds unbelievable opportunities and the technology that drives that sort of drastic change, is what we call technology 4.0. As a part of it, there it is Automation 4.0.

This close future that we are about to live is going to be DIGITAL.

Yeah, exactly and at this age, automation gets dived into many fields of application or today we have many types of Automation applications.

And the most important ones are —

Home Automation and The internet of things. It’s not too new that we are integrating hardware and the internet together to make controlling the most portable possible.

Things like the MS-DOS X10 smart automation system did exist back in the 80s. But with the Internet of things or IoT, the framework has been completely made open source.

Meaning that anyone can be able to build an IoT system for their home, and whether you agree or not that in the 21th century, everyone should learn to CODE but things like the virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Home provide a solid Engine to build developments around, since as a matter of fact, the frameworks of their APIs are also open source.

One of the other forms of Automation with the most potential is the self-driving cars. Unlike, home automation, self-driving cars need a lot of juice with sophisticated algorithms, huge data sets, and computing resources to function.

As GPUs or Graphics processing units are very good with parallel floating-point calculation, it is the one suitable to dive the self-driving cars. The blueprint for what you need to develop a functional self-driving car can not only operate on just self-driving cars but in all sorts of things, such as water BOTS that will intelligently server food, or construction or as a replacement of cops to catch crime and whatnot.

While Industry 4.0 seems to have an unlimited potential, and we are just stepping to living in the world — I had been super excited to make this, I personally always been so intrigued the concept of Technology 4.0 just because it feels like tomorrow that we are going to live it, unlike the concepts of the distant future, which also are pretty interesting but that’s a topic for another time.

If you are also fascinated by the future of technology and want to listen to Audio format of these types of Topics, check out my podcast —

The Road To Technology 4.0 | Automation 4.0 — AlphENsign Podcasts Episode 005

And if you like to watch a video, make sure to check out my youtube channel— AlphENsign TV

Thanks for reading :)