Editor’s Comments: I’m Just Saying

April 18, 2015

About a year ago, I wrote a blog for the Grading & Excavation Contractor magazine website titled “A Monumental Shift in Heavy Equipment Technology”. It was an April Fool’s day blog that imagined the emergence of a fictional equipment manufacturer named the “Butterfly Company.” I expanded the fiction with details about the fake company’s plans to create autonomous heavy equipment—machines with advanced degrees compared to the current smart machines.

The picture I painted included Butterfly recruiting software and engineering geniuses who have been writing millions of lines of code that pushed the edge of the envelope in discrete and combinatorial mathematics and theoretical physics to develop the programming that would run a line of excavators and dozers completely without human guidance. I even gave model designations to the fake machines along with a number of fake specifications.

The prototypes are the Butterfly T-20 Hybrid Excavator, and the Butterfly T-50 Crawler Dozer.

The T-20 has an operating weight of 89,576 pounds. Its maximum drawbar pull is 72,125 pounds. The bore of the boom cylinder is 6.5 inches, the stroke is 59.6. The bore of the stick cylinder is 7.2 inches, the stroke 72.3. The maximum flow of its hydraulic system is 165 gallons per minute. The maximum flow of its swing system is 79 gallons per minute. It meets final Tier 4 regulations and is equipped with a near silent stealth mode.

The Butterfly T-50 Crawler Dozer weighs in at 49,423 pounds. It can perform rough grading as well as precision finish grading in automatic mode, which is accomplished with fully automatic blade control. Its state-of-the-art hydrostatic drive transmission eliminates the possibility of being in the wrong gear, and allows full control of both tracks during turns while giving a boost in horsepower to glide through changes in direction. The T-50 is also Tier 4 compliant with selective catalytic reduction (SCR) technology.

I then made up the existence of the proprietary artificial intelligence software, “STOMACh” which stood for Sentient Telematics Optimizing Mimetic Analytical Characteristics. It was described as having GPS and GNSS with integrated sensors that relay data and information to a central command and/or other networked heavy equipment, all of which would be synced to a decision-making algorithm that gave the machines flexibility and creativity in their responses to stimuli. The machines would decide for themselves how best to get a job done with maximum productivity and efficiency. They would be able to take care of themselves with self-diagnostic routines and then fix themselves with self-correcting programs. Proactive defensive devices and counter-measures were built in to protect themselves from theft or vandalism.

I wrote that the software would operate via current Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology, and exist in a Cloud platform skipping from server to server on the Internet. I was giving a nod to the “Terminator” movies when I wrote that the creators were calling it a sort of “Sky Net.”

One year later, I continue to watch as machine control technologies continue to improve in the heavy equipment manufacturing industry. Manufacturers have begun planning for autonomous machines. This new breed will even be made without cabs in which operators would sit. The logical evolution of machine control leads inexorably to artifical intelligence (AI).

Recently, three noted citizens, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking have been warning about the dangers of AI. In tweets and a number of public appearances, Musk has compared the potential of unfettered artificial superintelligence to summoning the demon and even to Skynet from the Terminator movies. Musk has gone as far as donating $10 million to the Future of Life Institute for the creation of a grant program that will look into ways to make artificial intelligence friendly to humans.

Professor Stephen Hawking told the BBC, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,” he said. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.” The scenario where computers become self-aware and begin evolving themselves at super-human speeds is sometimes referred to as “the singularity,” a term that Professor Hawking also uses in his work on Black Holes and the Big Bang.

In an interview, Bill Gates stated, “I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. 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. A few decades after that, though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”

Back to about a year ago, after I posted my April Fool’s Day blog, one of the comments that was made in response was short and to the point. The anonymous commenter wrote, “Total BS.”

BS to be sure. But “total?” I think not. 
About the Author

Arturo Santiago

Arturo Santiago is the Managing Editor of Grading and Excavation Contractor and MSW Management magazines.