Both articles are showing that we are coming into a new industrial age, where robots and humans are working in close collaboration. In 1930s science fiction this would probably be scary, but I believe that we are creating some harmonization between robots and humans, leading to us complementing each other. Robots will typically be used for repetitive jobs. Not only in factories, but also for filtering out tables of data or, as in the first example here, writing short articles about Apple's latest press release. In a world where hundreds of companies are releasing numbers, robots can do their jobs presenting this data to the users in a format that makes sense already.

And what does this mean for control rooms? We see robots and software agents entering organizations for example at the sensor side: drones will work together with fire fighters or security people to reach out to zones that were formerly not accessible. Or they will browse through terabytes of data to scan for anomalies, only presenting the events when it is outside a predefined 'normal' operation. Even the learning process of those robots will be different from the past, as they will actually learn on the job, much like humans do. So there will be no more complex programming upfront, but an increased learning curve. Robots will start with small jobs, for example monitoring single alarms. Call them 'Robot Interns' (maybe I should trademark the word 'Robinterns' for future use?). Supported by large cloud processing power and storage, more and more data will be connected and complex learning can start. Deep Processing platforms from SAP, IBM and GE are now being used in beta projects on smart grids and cyber infrastructures.

These technologies will bring a complete different view on control rooms and will remove all the 'boring' elements. Some futurologist are even predicting a singularity where robots supported with artificial intelligence support humans pro-actively ,and become personal butlers in all the human's works and lives. This will drive new control room designs, where smaller clusters of experts will focus on the exceptions and the real business to be done. And an army of robots behind them, doing the processing.

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