Development of Industrial Automation
The computer age is over
The technology futurist
George Gilder’s insists that the computer age is over. The PC revolution, and
the silicon technology that triggered it, drove significant growth in the past
decade – but these technologies have now become commodities. Gilder suggests
that Intel and Microsoft are simply becoming icons of a bygone age – they no
longer shape the future.
Intel cannot continue to
leverage its power through producing giant chips in multi-billion-dollar
factories, because in the future computer intelligence will be disseminated in
tiny intelligent chips with wireless connections. The bloated code of Microsoft
will not be brought down by another software giant, but will be circumvented by
software that is part of every product and appliance. People will not use
software – it will simply be part of the things they use.
Of course, the microchip
and the computer will still retain their tremendous importance, in ways similar
to steel mills and power plants. They have past their peak and now simply
become part of the platform that is giving birth to new technologies that are
transforming human economies and cultures, faster and more drastically than
ever before.
Abundance and Scarcity
In the industrial age,
power (steam, coal, oil and electricity) was available in abundance. In the
past century, the cost of a kilowatt-hour equivalent dropped from hundreds of
dollars to about 5 cents and it continues to decline at about 2 percent per
year. De-regulation changes it from being a “scarce commodity” (a paradox of
words) that only the power company monopoly could provide and gives it the
status of a true commodity. While there may be temporary price surges,
de-regulation will inevitably cause eventual pricing to decline to a commodity
level.
A typical PC uses about
a thousand kW hours per year. The billion computers which are expected to be
connected to the Internet over the next five years, together with peripherals
and hundreds of billions of embedded chips, will consume as much electricity as
the entire US economy does today. So, power, once”abundance", will become
a "scarcity".
During the past 30
years, the cost of a transistor dropped from about $10 to a few millionths of a
cent, and continues to decline (Moore’s Law) at about 66% a year. Processing
MIPS (millions of instructions per second) that cost several millions of
dollars sell for less than a buck today. And we utilize that abundance not only
in computers and workstations, but also in video games and music synthesizers.
In short, the defining
abundances of the past few decades have been silicon and power. People used
those abundances to relieve the scarcities. In what Gilder defines as the
“macrocosm”, they use power to replace horses and slaves, while in the
"microcosm" they use silicon intelligence to replace human
intelligence.
Defining abundances and
scarcities mark every new era. And there is a natural overlap - the successes
of one era spur and enable the successes of the next. The plentitude of the
agricultural age loosed resources for the industrial revolution, while that in
turn served as a platform for the computer revolution. The sons of the
industrialists went off to study technology and came back to start new computer
or software companies, which now in turn are giving birth to the new era of
information connectivity.
The Inflection point
Over the years, people
always have felt that scarcity will ultimately prevail over abundance. However,
Necessity (the mother of invention) turns scarcity into abundance. Abundances
and scarcities play out in a spiral of reciprocity, with each producing its
opposite in the cycles of economic advance.
A scarcity finds meaning
and value in the future abundance that it causes – and that is the inflection
point. This is the where significant growth and wealth is generated for leaders
who utilizes knowledge and creativity to manipulate the future abundance while
it is still a scarcity.
Industrial automation is becoming a commodity
A few decades ago,
industrial automation involved a lot of proprietary knowledge, which generated
significant value for the purveyors of that knowledge. Industrial automation
products were an essential and proprietary ingredient in factories and process
plants. At the turn of the century, a lot of the proprietary content has melted
away through rapid and widespread dissemination of the information in the
global arena.
Automation knowledge
that produces quality goods at low cost has now become a commodity – everyone
knows how to do it. In many cases, the western world chased cheap labor in the
Far East and educated the locals with their knowledge as part of the project,
shortsightedly frittering away the value.
The features and
functions of conventional instrumentation and automation products are easily
copied and the cost reduces to quality manufacture of commodity products with
the lowest overhead. Software is also quickly and easily copied – if not
directly, then at least through availability of functional equivalents that can
be developed quickly and cheaply in countries like India, which have rapidly
become centers of the software universe.
Stop being incremental – look for change
DCS, PLCs, PC-based
SCADA and controls drove growth in the past, but they no longer shape the
future now we need new technologies to replace them, products and systems which
will provide the same functions – cheaper, faster, better. The old products
will simply become part of the platforms that give birth to new technologies
that transform the business landscape.
What we ARE good at in
the US is new technology. New growth and success will result only for leaders
who work with technology that is revolutionary enough to cause significant
change. Look for inflection points – the technologies that bring 10X improvements.
Industrial automation inflection points
For industrial
automation, several new inflection points will arrive in the next few years.
This is where the growth and success will occur, from which new instrumentation
and automation leaders will emerge.
Let me suggest my
favorite possibilities:
- MEMS-based Sensors & Actuators:
Micro-electromechanical systems that utilize semiconductor fabrication
techniques to produce miniature turbines, motors, gears, moving mirrors
and sensors.
- Nanotechnology: Atomic-scale systems, the next step
beyond MEMS. Production with old-style metal bending, grinding and cutting
will become obsolete as nanotechnology enables the building of products at
the atomic level.
- Wireless Links: Tiny, low cost, low power sensors and
actuators will be connected with wireless links that are fast, economical
and yield big advantages. Tiny is important because they can be scattered
around to measure just about everything that you can imagine. Low power,
because they won't need to have batteries replaced, and may be
solar-powered. Low-cost because the numbers required will be enormous.
- The Pervasive Internet: Soon bandwidth will be
plentiful enough to connect everything to everything. The old “islands of
automation” will disappear.
- Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS): The central control
hierarchies of the past will give way to new self-organizing peer-to-peer
networks, where intelligence resides directly in the sensors and
actuators, eliminating large, complex and ineffective centralized control
systems. By these standards, today’s PLC and PC-based controls and
software will seem ineffective, expensive and even archaic. CAS provides a
level of effectives and robustness that is unprecedented, and old
deterministic control architectures will disappear.
Review
your own company’s development plans. If the major developments are simply
"new and smaller" PLCs, or "bigger and better" software,
you should be nervous. You should be using the business slowdown to work at new
inflection points, to generate future growth and leadership?
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