20/02/2023
Jobs in manufacturing: what artificial intelligence does in industry
The twenties of the 21st century are the beginning of AI's heyday. Neural networks painted pictures, created medicine, and helped tame thermonuclear energy. But 2022 showed that even in the post-industrial era, industry remains the backbone of our civilization and our way of life. Whether artificial intelligence can help produce the goods and what Russian industrialists have already achieved by using machine learning is in an article in Naked Science's AI series.
For half a century, industry has been on the sidelines of most economies, including Russia, and the service sector has come to the fore. But for human life, industry is still primary: it is the industry that daily produces raw materials and transforms them into our familiar warm homes full of food, clothing and all sorts of things.
For all its importance to civilization, industrial work is hard, dangerous and sometimes thankless. This was the case immediately after the Industrial Revolution, which swept across the world from England to Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it remains so today.
Thinkers and humanists have offered many ideas for alleviating the plight of industrial workers. The most appealing was probably the idea of automation. If machines worked in place of humans, the problem would disappear. Entrepreneurs also liked this idea, because machines can work round the clock, and there are generally fewer problems with them than with people.
But replacing workers with machines was not so easy. The first automatic machines appeared in the USSR and the United States only in the mid-20th century. At that time there were already computers, and scientists were seriously talking that computing machines in the not too distant future would be able to think for humans. This meant that mines, plants, and factories could be made completely unmanned by putting them in the robotic hands of computers with artificial intelligence - and there it was, freedom from physical labor.
