Human Senses & Intelligence - Automation & AI

The stimulus has come from my recent engagement in facilitating or stimulating learning in students from Mechatronics Elective Subject at an Engineering College.

It was the 3rd session, subject - Sensors.

Pedagogy adapted

Using my experience of co-facilitating with Empretec India Foundation over past about 6 years, I had learnt one important lesson - "Adults learn when they want to learn", no amount of feeding and telling may impact their learning the subject. Students had assembled expecting to be shown a PPT, take notes and learn.

In anticipation of their learning outcome - using our sixth sense, I and the faculty from college had taken to sharing the content, notes and videos in the student WhatsApp group in advance.

I proposed to put out a short assignment from our 1st two sessions on the overall aspect of automation, which the faculty welcomed, 5 questions were shared, which brought the context of the project they would like to implement as the course got over, for experiential learning.

Instead of teaching from the document of sensors, we took up one of the projects, went into the HOW to control, or in other words, what will be the input data on the basis of which a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) would take decisions.

An hour of interactive discussion based on one of the projects - how to measure the RPM of a conveyor

Sensors - understanding them

Taking the cue from the student that the need was to see if the pallet is moving, the input that would be required for designing the automation system, we went over all the sensors from contact, non-contact, bringing in the basis of selection of sensors.

Using physical sensors, being able to touch and feel them, we were able to explain the sensor types.

Derived the decision making matrix on how to select a sensor - deriving the answers through questions - accuracy, precision, voltage, accessibility, etc.

Sensors and Human Senses

Thinking over the sensors, stimulated the relationship between sensors and human senses. The HUMAN mind is a processor, receiving inputs from the environment outside through the 5 senses.

As humans derived automation, all we have been perhaps doing is transfer the 5 senses into instruments that can give the processor similar decision making signals

The senses are important in our daily lives. The body receives signals from the environment through the sense organs, which send signals to the brain. The brain then processes the signals and sends information back to the body to tell it how to respond.

Sight: We see with our eyes.

Hearing: We listen with our ears.

Smell: We smell with our noses.

Taste: We taste with our tongue.

Touch: We touch with our skin.

What 5 senses are able to process perhaps may take a 100 or more sensing devices to measure and process.

One of the ways to understand sensors could be the way a human brain is processing information as a combination of all the 5 senses.

The 6th sense - intuition

The sixth sense, or someone's innate connection to the supernatural, is often attributed to deep intuition (with a small “i”). This kind of intuition is typically understood as the ability to “know” something without having any physical evidence to prove it.

Questions that have come to my mind after mulling over this thought, sensory organs are mere input devices, how does the brain or human intelligence then work on building the 6th sense - intuition.

Could the 6th sense be a higher level of human intelligence, which comes from continuous practice, and experience?

Could artificial intelligence be a form of 6th sense, as humans are transferring the way their brains process, their human intelligence into the processors?

The way the body reacts to external changes comes from a combination of what the sensory organs are transmitting to the processor - the brain. However, being in similar situations over and over, builds an internal intuition on how to react - the processing may move from the slow brain to the fast brain, could it be akin to expert intuition?

Perhaps participating in activities beyond my syllabus of running an enterprise is also feeding inputs of feelings, actions of individuals - how they respond to what is given to them. It keeps building my expert intuition on what it may take to stimulate or facilitate learning.