As machines enhanced by artificial intelligence expand from the factory floor into everyday life, setting rules on how they interact with humans will be vital.
Thomas Black is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist writing about the industrial and transportation sectors. He was previously a Bloomberg News reporter covering logistics, manufacturing and private aviation. Where’s the kill switch?Photographer: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images Artificial intelligence is sweeping across the economy. It’s showing up in the stock market with Nvidia’s meteoric rise, and the marketing blitz around AI is inescapable, whether from software providers peddling the promise of harnessed data to golf-club makers trumpeting an AI design. Narrow AI is now a real tool, and companies are figuring out how to deploy it.
Generative AI, virtual assistants and self-driving vehicles are some early use cases of the technology. Workers are being freed from tedious data-entry tasks such as extracting pertinent information from an email to fill an order and send a receipt. Software can scoop up financial data from public filings more quickly than a human and provide an instant synopsis. Most of this revolution is taking place in offices on company computers.
Where AI meets the physical world — and creates the potential for conflicts — is in manufacturing and logistics. Robots are already roaming factory and warehouse floors, and AI will make them smarter and more agile. As is usually the case with new technology, the military is prodding innovation. This marriage of AI and robots will require special rules to keep them constrained by humans, especially as these mobile machines move beyond the confines of a factory and become more prevalent in the service economy.
The AI applications now offered on mobile robots are for simple tasks, but they will only become more complex over time. Teradyne Inc. , which owns Universal Robots and Mobile Industrial Robots, sells a mobile pallet jack armed with five cameras that give it “sight” and a Nvidia chip that helps it “think” how best to pick up a pallet, even if it sits crooked or is damaged.
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