Four technology revolutions in the past 30 years have changed the world more than the original industrial revolution. This is the starting point for Guy Gecht’s opening presentation at Connect.
In front of a packed hall of nearly 1500 delegates, including 100 media representatives, he ranged far and wide in the visionary style that has become a hallmark of Connect. He identified the revolutions as:
- Personal Computers in 1980s
- Development of the internet in 1990s
- Arrival of the iPhone as the start of the mobile life in 2007
- And now… the increasing speed of the development of artificial intelligence (AI).
He maintains the AI revolution is being ever more powered by the massive increase in computational capability in the cloud along with the development of ever more powerful computers. Gecht recalled his days at university in Israel when the arrival of such functions as text identification seemed light years away. He picked the developmental milestones of events such as Gary Kasparov’s initial victory and then defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing computer in the 1996 and the 2011 victory of computers over the champion Jeopardy contestants as indicative of the increasing self-learning ability of computers that is defining AI.
Now he points to self-driving cars developed by companies such as Tesla and Google as a sign of how close is the arrival of fully-fledged AI.
This has little to do with the printing industry, or indeed with EFI. But it’s Gecht’s enthusiasm for the visionary that has always fuelled Connect. A total fan, he’s puzzled that what to him seems a self-evident good should raise such concerns among people he respects. Elon Musk, the inventor of the Tesla electric car, cautions, “We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.”
Mega-brain, Stephen Hawkins regards it as the development, “that could spell the end of the human race.” Even the mild-mannered Bill Gates sounds a note of alarm. “First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and be super intelligent. A few years after that though, the intelligence will be strong enough to be a concern.”
In a series of surveys he conducted, Gecht discovered that people share the same distrust of AI and such developments as self-driving cars. Many are concerned that AI would be used destructively by anti-social elements.
Less jobs, more machines
After making it clear that EFI has no intention, nor the money, to buy AI developers, Gecht confirmed the company was developing its own versions for the printing industry. He gave the example of software scheduling replacing skilled and experienced people. The key was that the software learned from the behaviour of the individuals before becoming capable of doing a better job.
Automation in production is another example of where the machines are taking over. A Maltese company, Lewis, increased its on time deliveries by 30% while cutting labour by 50% using the EFI Packaging Suite.
Outside the printing industry he told of how in 1990 Ford, Chrysler and General Motors had combined revenues of $250 billion with a market cap of $36 billion and employed 1.2 million people. In 2014 Apple, Facebook and Google have revenues of $247 billion, a market cap of $1+ trillion and employ a mere 137,000 people.
The point he’s making is that the next revolution is here already. That the printing industry is not immune to its effects and that we’re all going to have to develop change management skills to cope with the ‘Next Big Thing.’