TechWatch sat down with Norman Apsley, who has led the Science Park since 2000. Norman brings an upbeat view and some fascinating insights into the world of AI and robots. His background in applied physics makes him uniquely aware of the rising trend of robots—as manufacturing’s future is tied more closely to robotics than you may think.
I asked Norman to define AI. What’s the difference between, say, AI and regular data analytics? “The key thing is that an AI system self-learns,” he said.
“Many people assume a human form when they think of robots. But most of the cool humanoid projects we’ve seen in the news lately are happening out of Asia, Japan and so on,” said Norman. “Of direct relevance to Northern Ireland is the use of robotic arms in manufacturing.”
It’s easy to imagine a massive robotic arm being used to weld cars together. Bombardier has certainly used them to make wings for a long time. “That’s been happening for 30 years,” says Norman. But the fact is today’s robotic arms are capable on a much smaller scale, and can be used to make tiny components – such as the minute parts inside medical devices. That’s happening as we speak at Armstrong Medical in Coleraine.
Source: Universal Robots
The trend is that robots have become better at mimicking humans’ fine-motor skills, as opposed to gross-motor skills. Also the early robots were automatons, simply repeating a move they had been taught; today’s machine can react to their environment. This fact is why we shouldn’t fear robots, but instead welcome them – as robotic arms begin to take over some of finer work that has long been outsourced to China where masses of cheap labour exist. This Wall St Journal article published in June 2015 examines how robots could bring more manufacturing jobs back to the Western world, by taking the place of sweatshops, for instance.
“Vast advances in robotics have been made, thanks to advances in camera technology and GPS. 
With cameras being smaller and cheaper, slim enough that you can fit two high resolution cameras in a Smartphone the width of a fingernail, and a GPS chip small enough to fit in a watch, robots are becoming nimbler. The disruption robots can create here in NI would be areas like agriculture, where a robot the size of a tractor could take detailed images of a leaf pattern to see which plants are weeds, and destroy them one by one, eliminating the need for herbicides to be sprayed over a whole field of crops.”
Norman continued, “Artificial intelligence can be disruptive, too, such as building and facilities maintenance systems that are clued into weather patterns. Imagine a cold front moving over Belfast, and all the buildings in that system can adjust their heating as the weather moves in, much like a network of human facilities managers could do but in an automated way. Those are the buildings of the future.” 
While robots may have been putting low-skilled factory workers out of jobs over the past decades, new trends mean that white-collar workers aren’t immune.
“AI systems could also parse legal language to read and digest contracts, for instance, using the common language that exists in all contracts, reducing the need for solicitors to get involved,” said Norman.
Looking 10 or 20 years into the future, this shift in employment is something that we should embrace rather than fear. But even as AI systems take away the need for graduate-level workers, managers will still be required to oversee operations.
“The interesting question that we need to answer is, how do you become an experienced manager if robots are doing the lower level roles? Humans aren’t born managers; we start low and work our way up. I believe that senior partners will always be needed, in nearly every business, but how do you get there?”
Perhaps a future of My Boss, The Robot, is not too distant. We’ll update you when we replace Norman with a robot at the helm of the Science Park!
Jokes aside, I wonder whether robots can achieve the amount of evolution in one hour that it takes humans millennia, thereby surpassing our intelligence rapidly. (As soon as they’re intelligent enough to start this process, of course.)
What are the ethical implications of this? Norman said, “The price of base pieces inside robots is going down so incremental change has sped up, but there are still limitations – huge computational data storage is still expensive, for example. In terms of the evolution of robots, I believe it will take a very, very long time for robots to mimic human behaviour systems – they are simply too complex. Researchers couldn’t even make a robot mimic a fruit fly with its 100-odd neuron brain.” 
That’s a voice of reason in a world where the hype around robots can sometimes spin out of control. (Read Steven Hawking’s opinions that we have 100 years left to save the human race).
Norman continues, “Innovations in the margins are where I believe we’ll find dramatic change, e.g. in the ability to understand the full human genome, and where that can take us in human creation. That’s where immediate ethical questions may lie.”
By: Emily McDaid
