ChannelVision Sept-Oct 2017

EMERGENT productivity, improved cus- tomer service and reduced labor costs.” That’s because deriving value from IoT comes from not just collecting the data from connected assets, but then also harnessing those enormous data sets to parse out trends and analysis that in turn drive business decisions – in real time. It’s a task that no human workforce could possibly deliver. “At its core, the internet of things is about sensors embed- ded into devices of all kinds, which provide streams of data via internet connectivity to one or more central locations,” explained Brendan O’Brien, co-founder and chief evangelist at Aria Systems. “The purposes for transmitting sensor data are myriad, but the assumption in all cases is that that data can then be analyzed and acted upon in some way that is beneficial to the user.” AT&T, which is focused on IoT within its Partner Exchange, is eyeing this nexus. It has launched an IoT analytics capability, a pilot collaboration with IBM, which aims to help AT&T’s enterprise customers trans- form their industrial IoT data into analytic insights. The AT&T M2X, Flow Designer, Control Center and other IoT solutions allow AT&T’s enterprise customers to effectively manage and monitor devices, as well as collect, manage and store data; while IBM’s Watson IoT portfolio will be used for connecting, building, launch- ing and managing IoT apps and devices, including ana- lytics capabilities such as predictive maintenance that provides insights to improve asset performance. The platform aims to uncover critical business insights by providing a collaborative environment where valuable data from machines and de- vices can be combined with multiple sources of data, including a customer’s own sales and inventory data and publicly available informa- tion, such as weather and road conditions. For example, an oil and gas company wants to detect anomalous events within its wells: AT&T’s IoT analytics solutions will ingest data from hundreds of wells, creating the models necessary with appropriate machine learn- ing libraries and open-source technology to help predict potential failures or machine malfunctions. The company will be able to detect anoma- lies in less time and with more accuracy. “We have more than 30 million connected devices on our network today and that number continues to grow – primarily driven by enterprise adoption,” said Chris Penrose, president of IoT Solutions at AT&T. “Businesses are eager for actionable data insights from their connected devices that help improve their pro- cesses and take the guess- work out of decision-making. Integrating the IBM Watson Data Platform into our IoT capabilities will be huge for our enterprise customers.” With 65.6 percent of respondents in a survey from 451 Research saying they plan to increase their IoT spending in the next 12 months, a focus on this mar- ket can be a differentiating one for partners. o Our Dark Robot Overlords For all of the promise of AI, there are plenty of very bright minds that caution against letting it get out of hand, Terminator -style. Researchers at Oxford University say that AIs with malicious intent are actually “a threat to human civilization, or even possibly to all human life.” In a paper on emerging extinction threats, they outlined the issue: “Extreme intelligences could not easily be controlled (either by the groups creating them, or by some international regulatory regime), and would probably act to boost their own intelligence and acquire maximal resources for almost all initial AI motivations. And if these motivations do not detail the survival and value of humanity, the intelligence will be driven to construct a world without humans. This makes extremely intelligent AIs a unique risk, in that extinction is more likely than lesser impacts.” Yes, they said “extinction.” The Oxford researchers aren’t alone in their assessment. Elon Musk, the Tesla Motors and SpaceX entrepreneur, has called AI “our biggest existential threat,” comparing it to a demon that, once summoned, cannot be controlled. Fellow celebrity geek Bill Gates is concerned as well. “First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super- intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well,” he said during a Reddit Ask Me Anything Q&A back in 2015. “A few decades after that though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern.” And as if that weren’t enough, Stephen Hawking has weighed in too, famously opining that, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” The essential (and existential) problem is that we as humans will not be able to compete – AI will evolve and grow its brain capacity at a much faster rate than any other “species” has ever done, relegating us to an inferior, second- class status, ripe for enslavement – or genocide. All of that said, AI remains one of the least understood global challenges, and there is much uncertainty as to the development timeline. “There is considerable uncertainty on what timescales an AI could be built, if at all, with expert opinion shown to be very unreliable in this domain,” the Oxford report noted. “This uncertainty is bi-directional: AIs could be developed much sooner or much later than expected.” Channel Vision | September - October, 2017 14