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60 SMT007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2019 Accelerating Tech—Insights from the Smarter Factory by Michael Ford, AEGIS SOFTWARE The Truth Behind AI The term "artificial intelligence" or "AI" has become a source of confusion for many—her- alded as part of Industry 4.0, yet associated with the threat of automation replacing human workers. AI is software rather than hardware, and not yet the entity that destroys civilization, as Hollywood movies would have us believe. It's time to put these elements of AI into con- text, enabling us as an industry to embrace the opportunities that so-called AI represents without being drawn in, or pushed away, by the hype. What is AI to You and Me? There are two distinct flavors of AI in peo- ple's minds. The first came in for many as plotlines in Hollywood movies where futuristic machines would take over the world. The criti- cal element of the story is not the machines that do harm, but the software that drives them where a sophisticated algorithm became able to think for itself in a way that was like- ly not intended. It is this aspect of achieving thought without the specific coding of such thought processes that define true intelligence. Humans are credited with having intelligence already, though there may be exceptions. Ma- chines, on the other hand, are guided only by their software, which is limited to being re- active to events that take place and are com- municated to them today. They follow a set of rules designed to achieve the desired result. It is claimed that general human behavior can also be modelled, albeit by a far more sophis- ticated and evolved process. The achievement of, or at least the perception of intelligence,