Digitalization – Humanization

Because of Digitalization, we are currently in the midst of remarkable, constant changes that affect our everyday life in many ways. For the past years, these changes have been clear but still pretty subtle. We’ve been slowly boiling like a frog placed in warm water; most of us just noticing that something is happening around us but not feeling forced to jump. However, the speed of change has recently started to accelerate on many fronts – political, environmental, and technological – so fast that even the most tolerant of us start noticing it; the water temperature is very quickly rising from convenient body temperature to boiling. An example of such an activity is the quite unexpected result of the US elections, which actually was a case of commercial manipulation of the crowd opinion on an unprecedented scale and of the results by using advanced analytics. Another example is the quite recent announcement from SpaceX that they will take private space tourists on a round trip around the moon and later land more tourists on the surface. That is a private company pulling off something that used to require the resources and focus of powerful nations. And it will be done faster and more efficiently, believe me. These are just tiny steps for Mr. Musk, as his target is to conquer Mars and provide a sanctuary for doomed mankind. Both of these cases are examples of Digitalization and the scale of its implications.

What does Digitalization actually mean by definition? At the moment, I look at the phenomenon from inside of a company operating in the manufacturing industry, a context where Digitalization unfortunately often comes down to straightforward technology. In this context, there are plenty of interpretations that are quite shallow, not counting in anything that is happening outside the industrial domain or among its direct customers, which, I think, is a grave mistake. Those who are most distressed are the people in typical automation and process industries saying that “there’s nothing new here, we’ve done this for thirty years”, meaning mainly process control or simple implementations of factory automation and early proactive maintenance applications. Well, certainly digital signals are being used for controlling robots or processes in these applications, or for pointing out simple direct failures in the process, but this is not Digitalization in its actual meaning. Actually, this is what The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) refers to as Digitization: “the action or process of digitizing; the conversion of analogue data into digital form.” Not much more valuable are the definitions of those start-ups that are vowing to the ubiquitous applications that are thought to be solely omnipotent. Correct; with the applications, we are able to perform many of the tasks that previously required analog technology or human actions without any Digitization, thus actually still referring broadly to the term. We are really already much more advanced than this at the moment, so there is a need to go even further. Gartner defines Digitalization as follows: “Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.” This is very much business-oriented and also much more to the point but still leaving a big part of the implications unnoticed. However, Gartner’s view combined with OED’s definition of Digitalization as “the adoption or increase in use of digital or computer technology by an organization, industry, country, etc.” finally brings us to the essence of how Digitalization affects human life as a whole and what it enables as well as to its meaning to the manufacturing industry, for example. The fact is that everything will be digitalized, whether we want it, believe it, expect it, or not – even in manufacturing. Our beliefs or previous experiences from the past do not count at all.  

One of the most interesting and relevant Digitalization trends having direct effect on manufacturing is Dematerialization. It means that with digitalization, things that were physical in the past will be transformed, or dematerialized, basically into software products or services or to simpler structures. This, of course, is already happening all the time: a well-known example is the transformation of the music industry from delivering pressed plastic discs, LP’s or CD’s, first into the combination of iTunes and iPod, and then eventually to Spotify and similar online streaming services where music is distributed and consumed in digital form, without any physical media. Another example would be the traditional metal keys that operate simple mechanical locks. These keys are first turned into pieces of plastic with some embedded electronics, and they will eventually dematerialize into applications on our mobile devices connected to cloud services. Furthermore, the car industry is unavoidably changing from gasoline-run cars to electronic ones, using electrical drives that are much simpler to manufacture and consist of much fewer parts than an internal combustion engine. The battery technology is still a bottle neck, but when it evolves more and the electric cars become common, that will not be the only drastic change: the whole gasoline logistics chain will also have to change. Here the essence is that the physical media which has had to be manufactured in one way or another is disappearing, which naturally has direct implications on manufacturing. The things to be manufactured either do not exist anymore or require different tools and methods.

However, the most remarkable area affecting our world in general is the utilization of data: the public may not even understand the magnitude with which data-driven psychology or psychometrics, a field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement combined with big data analysis and advanced analytics, affected the latest well-known election results mentioned earlier. Based on findings in data acquired from Facebook, psychologist Michal Kosinski was able to create a theory which was applied (or copied) by a SCL Elections’ subsidiary, Cambridge Analytica, for actually guiding data-driven communication in such a way that the message of an individual candidate was customized to fit the competitive situation and to express what an extremely finely segmented target group or even individual people wanted to hear. There are other analytics platforms like Palantir that say they are augmenting human intelligence instead of replacing it, which brings us to another important area – AI, Artificial Intelligence.

The development of AI is one of the biggest opportunities of humankind, and also one of the biggest threats, according to Stephen Hawking, the world famous theoretical physicist, who stated that AI will overrun us in the future. In the meanwhile, one of the most well-known AI’s, IBM Watson, was recently able to quickly diagnose a very rare form of cancer that the doctors were not able to find. It ran through 20 million medical articles in 10 minutes and came up with a correct diagnosis and treatment. That was a very nice demonstration of the power of a weak AI, which, after all, Watson is. We still haven’t seen a strong AI, not to mention a super AI, which might finally prove Mr. Hawking right; Super AI will be able to defeat human intelligence by definition.

Furthermore, in the center of all this is digital communication, and in the heart of the communication is the Internet. Some say it is broken because of the constant threat of hackers, eavesdropping, and distrust in all exchange that takes place over the Web. It is claimed that Blockchain will solve the biggest problems of the internet as it is now and become the second internet as a platform of trust, giving individuals means to control and take ownership of data. Projects like Blockstack are working on this.

Even further, when AI and blockchain are combined, you get Numerai, a hedge fund in which an artificially intelligent system chooses all trade, and where thousands of anonymous data scientists are crowdsourced to create the trading algorithms. Even Wall Street, and the whole banking system, will have to change in front of these novel approaches.

By the way, regarding AI, some researchers even predict the future to be populated not by super AI’s, but by Ems – software emulations of human brains that run in supercomputers thousands of times faster than the human brain.

Now, looking at all this from the human perspective, what does Digitalization really enable? It actually enables us to solve fundamental problems, IF it is applied correctly and not solely from a technology or a business point of view. It might lead to science fiction horror, but focusing on the basic human needs, it gives us the possibility to truly change everything. That’s why Digitalization actually should be regarded as equivalent to Humanization – the act of making more human. Reaching this will require very different thinking models, like the one of Bill Gates who proposed that robots, or manufacturing machines in general, should pay taxes since they are provided with what used to be human jobs. Some food for much needed alternative thoughts.

(Originally published in Interpersona Newsletter 1/2017, http://www.e-julkaisu.fi/interpersona/newsletter/1-2017/en/mobile.html?goto=8)