Comment

There’s nothing artificial about intelligence.
Industry 4.0 appears to be rearing its head all over the place at the moment – the latest term used to describe the evolution of manufacturing and construction. In our desire to categorise everything so that we can understand trends a little better, we have decided to number four stages of evolution retrospectively, starting from the Industrial Revolution back in the 1780s. We have an article in this newsletter that describes it more completely.

Industry 4.0, of course, describes the digitization of the industry, and, furthermore, highlights the fact that the manufacturing and construction industries are coming together, sharing technologies, work processes, information – ‘commoditising’ the building industry, perhaps – with off-site manufacture, JIT building processes, data driven construction, ergonomics, analytics and so on. Enabling Industry 4.0 is the Internet of Things – the precursor for Smart Cities, where the wealth of information being harvested about every form of activity in the city is analysed, processed and enhanced using artificial intelligence to monitor, plan and control the way in which all of the different elements can interact seamlessly.

I wasn’t quite going there when I started this short piece, but now it’s on its way I have to continue. The end result of this is the quite logical conclusion – where Stephen Hawking has already trod – that AI driven computers must ultimately decide that cities will run much more efficiently without having to cater for their human inhabitants.

David Chadwick

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