Really, screens are going to be dead.
Yes, the death of screens sounds drastic. However...
As we well know, Hal went live at the University of Illinois in 1992, at least in the movies.... Now it is 2025, 33 years past that fictional milestone, and the reality has hit. Screens are dying.
From my earliest days, staring at a 12” black and white tv attached to my beloved Atari 2600 in my youth, to majoring in analytics in college, to having dinner with my kids and realizing WhatsApp got a quicker response than a verbal question, screens have had a major impact on my time on this planet.
But screens are a dying breed. The reason is they are very useful, but their usefulness is quickly diminishing.
A good example of this is the last election. It was no longer the “election influenced by Twitter (X)” but the “podcast election”. Watching a podcast on a screen is about as interesting as watching people sit at a coffee shop, I’m sure it’s done, I just cannot fathom why.
People want to consume information quicker, in the most efficient way possible. Businesses want to do it in the most cost-effective way possible. For humans, conversations are the natural way disseminate complex information into knowledge.
It's how we evolved as humans. To have conversations not stare at a screen.
In business, some of the most complex computer systems require screens today to accomplish this. The provide tools, like ERPs, CRMs, FMS, EPC, CAD, etc., creating data, consolidated into information that a human could stare at on a screen and creating knowledge. Yes, using that Information Systems degree I got 25 years ago…a 4 year experience in creating awesome reports...
Today, with natural language processing AI, I can ask the questions aloud, like to a friend or colleague, "are we going to hit our production target?" and get an answer.... then drill down to "why not"? and get a root cause. We are closer than you think to a Space Odyssey.
With this, screens will die, or at least be much less useful...
Here are two specific examples from off-highway equipment that highlight this point:
Heavy Equipment Telematics/Asset Health – The cost to implement telematics has dropped significantly over the last 20 years. J1939 ISO standards has made access to the data easier, improved communication networks have made it faster, cheaper cloud storage has made it almost a perfect ecosystem for enabling this system. And yet, Asset Health/Telematics remains an enigma in many heavy industries.
The reason is the cost of co-creating the value with the system. A rough analysis says it takes between 4-10 engineers staring at screens, watching trends, root causing failure modes, etc. to run an asset health system on a typical off-highway fleet between 50-100 pieces of equipment. Depending on regional salaries, the labor costs can be up to 50x the cost of installing the system over 5 years. AI can reduce this effort, in fact take that data, analyze automatically and push that knowledge to the workshops, bypassing the offices and screens, to those doing the preventative maintenance and repairs.
Short Interval Control (Short-Term Planning and Fleet Management Systems) – Autonomous equipment requires many elements to work correctly, fleet management is one of them. Whether manned or unmanned, the machines need to be informed of where to go, and what to do. Advanced fleet management systems today still use algorithms like Linear Programming Dynamic Programming, Constraint Satisfaction and Integer Programming, and other advanced methods. This is part of what drew me to this space 15 years ago, the chance to be cutting edge on decision automation (information systems resulting in more than a pie chart....)
However, as anyone who has used these systems would know, a lot of decision making is still required. For short term planning, some “what if” scenario planning can occur, frequently resulting in re-running the plan based on new constraints. In real-time systems, like dispatching systems, it is much harder to know if a decision (constraint) will have an immediate improvement or detraction. This is based on the decision making and insights of an experienced dispatcher. This is also why many mining managers have a real trust issue with these systems, they still require a level of human intuition.
A world class dispatcher can easily increase productivity by 11% on a shift, however world-class dispatchers are hard to find. They frequently becoming trainers and/or move up the ladder to more prestigious roles. This role turnover has lead to the creation of many very good consulting firms helping humans run these systems better.
However, with the implementation of AI into the overall Short Interval Control system, the goals will can be transferred and updated in near real time, allowing AI decision support, or even automation of these configuration decisions. Basically making the humans better. All of this greatly reducing the need for screen time.
Concluding thoughts…
Screens will not be fully dead. That was of obviously a bit of click bait. However these new technologies will surely reduce the overall screens and screen time needed for value-creating systems.
Lastly, if were doing a photo shoot of technology, do not have someone pointing at a screen... those days are over. The future probably looks more like the past, a guy talking into a mic...
Recommendations
If you found this article interesting, please comment, like, and/or repost.
About the Author
Andrew Crose is an experienced, customer-centric global executive, having led business growth and profitability at technology companies including SaaS software, heavy machinery equipment, autonomous and EV vehicles around the world.
Account manager, mining division -EMEA Hexagon Mining
1 周AI's ability to deliver quick, evolving, accurate results would maximize the benefit of the huge flow of data generated by all the sensors that all equipments comes with. The future is a person on a Mic and also a person with a drawing board to enhance all the equations for those algorithms.