Why Our Machines’ Inner Lives Are the Key to the Next Economic Revolution

The digital and physical worlds are converging. In the coming years, the Internet of Things is going to put 50 billion machines online, each shipping off a continuous stream of data.

But what does that mean?

This week I spoke at Tim O’Reilly’s Solid conference, which brought together 1,300 great minds in both hardware and software. I shared GE’s perspective on where the great mash-up of physical and digital is going.

In the simplest terms, our machines are telling us about their inner lives.

Digital technologies such as wearable devices are increasingly monitoring and interacting with the physical world. Machines are being outfitted with thousands of sensors that help them monitor their own performance.

For the first time in history, intelligence is spreading not only from person to person—it’s spreading from human to machine, from machine to machine, and then back to humans. This communication, through the Industrial Internet, is going to create enormous value and improve outcomes for industries from health care to aviation to power and beyond.

This new, mashed-up operating system is going to fundamentally change how we work and live. Here are some maxims for the new Brilliant Age.

You’ll Need the Rosetta Stone…Soon We’ll Be Fluent in Machine

Today, industrial machines speak a Babel-worthy variety of languages that are only intelligible to people with highly specialized training. We have to become machine whisperers to understand what they’re saying.

To filter and visualize the flood of information our machines gather, we need experience design – information-rich interfaces with beautifully designed typography that are sound-enabled so that we can have conversations with data at the speed of thought.

Experience design will make machines’ messages much clearer and deliver a simplicity premium. You’ll pay more to get less of the things that get in your way, and more of what helps you get the job done.

Know Your Machine, Part 1: The Selfish Machine

Our machines will become quite selfish and exacting. They’ll want to perform at a high level, and they will tell you how to help them.

Jet engines, for example, will be outfitted with more sensors to gather data on the environments they fly through. They’ll use their computational power to monitor themselves and instruct future generations based on what they learn.

We’ll be able to fix engines before they break and extend their useful life. If an average airline with 100 777 aircraft extends their engines’ time on wing by just 1 percent, it saves approximately $100 million over the lifetime of the fleet.

Know Your Machine, Part II: The Selfless Machine

Even selfish machines will have the capacity for generosity. Machines won’t just say, “This is how I'm performing,” they’ll also say, “There’s a machine beside me that needs to be replaced.”

For example, GE’s brilliant turbines on a wind farm don’t just create their own energy. Using software that analyzes tens of thousands of data points per second, each turbine adjusts its torque and direction in line with the farm’s other turbines to make sure the group is maximizing its productivity.

For EDP Renewables, which has installed the turbines, that could mean an extra 420,000 megawatts-hours of extra electricity from its farms’ combined 402 turbines, enough to power 33,000 average U.S. homes.

Machine, Knock Down That Wall

The lines between design and function are being erased. With 3-D printers and easy-to-master design software, the world of both manufacturing and design has never been more accessible.

That has implications not only for individual makers, but also for the largest engineering and machine production companies. Designers, makers, and customers working together to create better production hubs makes for brilliant factories. Workers are going to wield welding guns and write code.

We’re learning from a new class of entrepreneurs who are fluent in both digital and hardware and applying their skills to areas like robotics, energy storage, health, and wearables. An Indonesian designer who entered GE’s competition on the open engineering platform GrabCAD designed a jet engine bracket that weighs 80 percent less than its predecessors.

In the end, data, machine sensing and enhanced human understanding will fuel a virtuous cycle of productivity: gather-analyze-adjust. Welcome to the Brilliant Age.

Photo: Mimadeo / shutterstock