Thinking back to my childhood, I find it odd why I remember some memories so vividly while most are lost to time. I have this one absolutely clear memory. I was walking home with my mother (most likely carrying a rented copy of Star Wars or Empire Strikes Back from the local video store, which was a novelty at the time). I must have been going on about something I read about robots… I think I got a book about robots around that age and I saw pictures of some of the first industrial robots of the time. Anyway, I can clearly remember my mother telling me that she was afraid everyone was going to lose their job to a robot soon.

I think the reason this memory stuck with me was how contrary it was to the culture of kids at the time. We idolized robots. The coolest things in our lives were droids, AT-ATs and Transformers (my, how things have changed, eh?). But this wasn’t over-the-top paranoia, it was the generally accepted truth at that time. For the most part, those anxieties have vanished along with fears of nuclear war, only to be replaced by new anxieties of terrorism.

The truth is that we’ve been replacing people with robots for the last quarter of a century, and the unemployment rate peaked in the early 80′s and has been going down, not up! How is it possible that unemployment has fallen while automation is rising?

A History Lesson

In 1865, William Stanley Jevons published a book called The Coal Question. “In it, Jevons observed that England’s consumption of coal soared after James Watt introduced his coal-fired steam engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of Thomas Newcomen’s earlier design … Jevons argued that any further increases in efficiency in the use of coal would tend to increase the use of coal. Hence, it would tend to increase, rather than reduce, the rate at which England’s deposits of coal were being depleted.”

This effect became known as the Jevons Paradox:

In economics, the Jevons paradox … is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox as it ran counter to popular intuition. However, the situation is well understood in modern economics. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given use, improved efficiency lowers the relative cost of using a resource – which increases demand and speeds economic growth, further increasing demand.

Automation Increases the Efficiency of Human Resources

Workers are a resource too. Automation is just a technological means to improve the efficiency of people, allowing one person to do the work of many. Since there is no cap on the demand for work, automation increases the demand for workers, since each worker becomes more valuable. Hence, unemployment goes down and wages go up.

ControlsOverload Improves Your Efficiency

When I first got into controls, you learned everything by reading a paper manual (if you could find one) or by trial and error, or if you were lucky, from someone else in your company who had used this technology before. We wasted hours trying to figure stuff out, but we accepted this because it was normal. But it also made us inefficient.

Google came along but largely passed us by. Vendors keep their knowledge bases behind locked doors on the internet, and when working on the plant floor, we rarely had internet access anyway, but that’s changing. Many of us now have smartphones so we can access the internet from anywhere. Sometimes we even have WiFi.

Enter ControlsOverload, Web 2.0 meets Controls Engineering. You don’t need to pay anyone to join. You don’t even need to register to ask or answer a question. It asks that you leave your name, email address, and website, but you can make these up if you want to remain anonymous.

When you start typing your question into ControlsOverload, it automatically searches the existing questions to see if it’s already been asked. As the amount of content on the site grows, the chance that you’ll get your answer immediately grows as well. If the question hasn’t been asked before, posting your question is a single click away. When you get answers, registered users can vote them up or down. The best answers rise to the top, so you don’t have to search through 7 pages of forum posts to find the most relevant or correct answer.

Questions are also “tagged” by technology. Perhaps you’re a vendor and you want to see all the questions related to your products. Here’s the page for all Allen-Bradley technologies for instance. If you want, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the same page.

Will it work? The technology is already a huge success story for traditional PC programming, along with other topics like parenting and personal finance. It works. People participate because it’s really useful.

The point of ControlsOverload is to make us more efficient, as an industry. We waste less time figuring out how to do the simple stuff, like how to copy symbols out of a PLC into Excel and vice-versa.

Doesn’t this mean we’re giving away our valuable knowledge for free? Are we essentially automating ourselves out of a job?

There’s no doubt our jobs will change. We will spend less time doing trial and error and more time solving customers’ problems. The customer doesn’t care about editing PLC programs; they care about making their facility more efficient. If we can solve that problem faster and easier, then we’re more efficient. If we’re more efficient, the demand for our services goes up.

Whether you participate or not, ControlsOverload is going to increase the demand for controls engineers, and that’s going to increase the wages of controls engineers. ControlsOverload will make you more money.

On the other hand, if your business strategy is to be the only one on the block who remembers the arcane technical details of a Fanuc RJ3iB controller, I’m sorry to tell you that the viability of that business model is quickly being exhausted.

Join us on ControlsOverload:

• Pool your knowledge.
• Make connections.
• Be more productive.

controlsoverload

(This is part 1 of a trilogy. When you’re finished reading this, you can read Part 2: Why Automation Equipment Vendors Dabble in Integration and Part 3: Lowering the Cost of Automation Equipment.)

I’m not the first person to notice that industrial automation technology isn’t keeping up with the rapid pace of technological change that we’ve all grown used to. Jim Pinto commented on it years ago:

Industrial automation business seems to be stuck in the mold of being a slow-growth, stable business. This generates a mindset, perhaps even complacency that inhibits change. In my opinion it’s marketing myopia, an unwillingness to think “outside the box”.

Most major automation companies have gross-profit margins of 40-50%, the industry mindset. Many other large companies in other businesses generate much lower gross margins, in the region of 20-25%. Some of this may be accounting differences, but the broad-brush differences are there. Traditionally, automation business is based on higher gross margins and lower net-profit, and it’s difficult to think outside that box.

In the industrial market, only 2-3% is spent on R&D, with some lower than that. By contrast, many of high-tech manufacturers spend 10-15% – Cisco 15-20%, with HP, Lucent, in the 8-10% range, and Motorola and Ericsson at 10-15%. One wonders what the impact would be, if industrial automation companies doubled, or even tripled, their R&D investments.

How is it that an industry like industrial automation equipment can have margins in the 40 to 50% range when their primary customers are manufacturers, probably the most price-conscious market in the world today? I’ll tell you why: they’re smart. Here’s what they did…

Originally they all sold interchangeable parts. You built a control system out of power supplies, relays, terminal blocks and valve banks. All of these parts are available, in replacement form, from various manufacturers and distributors so competition keeps margins tight. Even if you only used P&B relays, it’s pretty easy to switch your standard to Phoenix if you can get a better deal.

Then they came out with something revolutionary: the PLC. Manufacturers jumped on it because you could take four double-door panels worth of relays and replace it with a single unit, and even reprogram it in real time! It was truly a marvel of technology, but it shifted the balance of power in the industry away from the customers and towards the vendors. Now this single piece of equipment that controls the assembly line isn’t interchangeable with other vendors. Not only that, but it requires expensive programming software, not to mention a steep ramp-up time for the maintenance and engineering departments to learn the technology. Manufacturers started standardizing on “automation platforms”. Obviously this creates vendor lock-in. Once you standardize on one technology, the vendors can pretty much count on your continued business as long as they provide good support and a clear upgrade path. The barrier to switching technologies is so great that vendors can afford to have high margins, and they don’t feel the pressure to innovate like in other markets.

Unfortunately this means manufacturers are losing. They’re not getting as much value for their money as they could be. Here are some examples of what a PLC should be able to do as we approach the year 2010 (but can’t):

• Open an ODBC connection to a database and execute basic create, read, update and delete (CRUD) instructions, straight from ladder logic, without the need for expensive 3rd party software.
• Send an email or text message when a machine goes down, or on any sort of event.
• Support for Secure Socket Layer (SSL) the same technology your banking website uses. This would prevent exposure of some of our critical infrastructure to network security threats.

Another unfortunate side effect is reduced innovation in the system integration space. Let’s say you’re a system integrator and you want to develop some product for a niche market, you have to choose an automation technology to base it on. Once you’ve chosen that controls technology, say Allen-Bradley, you’re also locked in. You’re going to find it hard to sell your product to a customer that has standardized on Siemens, which means you have to invest extra effort, money, and time in re-engineering your product to work on their platform. Worse, their platform may not have all the features that your product requires, so it may not work as well. It’s not much of a product if you have to re-work the design every time, which means it’s harder to recoup your development cost.

Ultimately, automation technology is more expensive and less powerful because automation equipment vendors have stopped innovating.

innovation

I recently watched the TED video about Pranav Mistry demonstrating his “Sixth Sense” technology, and my head is spinning with ideas about the future of home automation:

At first I was blown away by the potential of the Microsoft Surface technology. They keep talking about using it on a coffee table, but for some reason, I always envision my refrigerator door as a Surface, covered with digital photos from our photo album, digital post-it notes, to-do lists, etc.. Maybe even little spelling games that my daughter can play with on the bottom of it, just like she plays with magnets and letters now.

But the sixth sense technology fundamentally shifts those ideas. First of all is price. The Surface is $10,000 (that’s an expensive refrigerator, by any stretch of the imagination). Of course the price will come down, but the components in the Sixth Sense demo are off the shelf and only cost $300, plus he’s open-sourcing the software! There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the two ideas either. Just mount the Sixth Sense system statically over your coffee table or above your fridge and you’ll get an (albeit reduced performance) similar system for a fraction of the cost.

What else could Sixth Sense do in the home? Synchronize your paper calendar on the wall with your Google calendar? Automatically pause the TV when you get up to leave the room? How about when someone from a charity comes to your door asking for donations… could I hold up their information brochure in front of me and let it look up their score on Charity Navigator and project the score on the brochure for me?

The possibilities are impressive. What would you do with Sixth Sense?

sixth-sense · surface