Lots of features!

If we mostly focus on process automation and control, we can miss that other fields evolve in eerily parallel ways. For instance, sometime in the mid-1960s, our wooden blocks, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys were joined by plain, cripplingly hard, plastic Lego bricks. They were quickly joined by gears, little turntables, and wheels with rubber tires, including some that could be attached to slightly larger bricks with battery-powered motors.

In later years, Lego added Bionicle action figures, programmable Mindstorms sets, and rigidly designed, co-branded, movie tie-in sets that, sadly in my opinion, forced kids to assemble exactly what was pictured, instead of building whatever the heck they could think of. Most recently, these longstanding items were just joined by Lego’s new Smart bricks that are reported to be even more programmable with even more features. Sound familiar?

Hopefully, some coloring outside the lines is still possible, but I worry it’s not, and that even thinking about it may be discouraged because it doesn’t generate revenue. Beyond being free, the underlying advantage of cardboard boxes and sticks is their simplicity and abstractness make them blank slates that draw out the imagination, and asks creativity to fill in the details of whatever game is we’re playing or world we’re building. This is another reason why it’s essential to regularly get children and everyone else off their screens and out into the physical world.

No flashy, brand-name distractions, simulation or reproduced realities can do this, even if they advertise that they can. In fact, that’s why they have to be flashy in the first place.

Likewise, there’s also a generation-gap-related, information technology/operations technology (IT/OT) convergence problem that can make regular hucksterism even worse. It can be illustrated by the potential horror of taking elderly relatives to the Apple store, and trying to run interference and mediate between them and the typically young and always super-excited salespeople.

Older consumers, who often overlap with older engineers, just want basic tools for basic tasks. The young staffers want to deluge them with their universe of endless features! I know many are just trying to be helpful, and aren’t always seeking to upsell, but it can be hard to gauge the difference. This is why Tom Waits’ masterpiece, “Step right up”, remains so refreshing.

Given how the above history unfolded, it’s no accident we ended up at the way-above-flood-stage ocean of artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalization. (I’m trying not to say the t-word because it’s overused and diluted.)

I did the best I could to report on and summarize all the new digitalized and AI-related lingo and tools in the “New virtualization, AI and others toolbox” sidebar in this issue’s “Free to move” cover story. However, as usual, I only scratched the surface. There are more popping up all the time like smiling and sadly indestructible Whack-a-Mole heads.

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The only defense against all this crap is ignoring and discarding 99.99% of it. Next, triage, prioritize and filter out the few useful grains. Not surprisingly, going out and investigating helpful solutions is always more fruitful than waiting for them to arrive from helpful partners who aren’t either.  

This is why it’s more crucial than ever to know your applications, and the requirements of your processes and people. You must know what you’ve got, what you know you need, and what problems you must solve, even if you’re unsure about some and perhaps clueless about others. This includes learning enough about the present state of your processes, equipment, personnel, software, networks, facilities, support services and infrastructure, management, enterprise and supply chains, as well as how their needs are likely to evolve.

For even well-informed engineers and operators, there are doubtless more than a few gaps in their processes that it would help to look into and fill. As far as I can tell, adjusting the holes in your filter, sieve or net for what you genuinely require is the only way to separate the few useful nuggets from all the garbage.

If my mailbox is any indication, imminent Medicare eligibility puts me and millions of others at the edge of an even more bottomless pit of come-ons from a horde of parasites, I mean partners, who are literally shivering with the anticipation of helping me by having me give them money. Where’s that net?