British institutions
Cinemagoers that have seen the film “Imitation Game” now know that autistic people focused on cryptography and mathematics can save a nation. Others probably remember vaguely that Alan Turing (the hero of the film) gave his name to a famous test and a machine capable of solving algorithms. Given the task of cracking the communication code used by the Germans during the World War II, Alan Turing had the ingenious intuition that the mass of information necessary for decrypting messages could not be handled without the help of a machine. He therefore built an astonishing ribbon mechanism, which after months of trial and error, would get the better of Enignam, the German encrypting machine.
Another 30 years was required for computers to be genuinely developed (microchips were only invented in 1969), but Turing, the visionary Englishman, had already taken the first steps towards artificial intelligence as of the early 1940s. With incredible clairvoyance, he even reflected on the possible limits of this new form of intelligence as soon as of the end of the war. He predicted that one day a machine would trap man by its ability to imitate its language. In order to validate his intuition, as of 1950, he proposed his famous test, which still motivates numerous IT teams impatient to take it successfully.
Sixty-five years on and around 10,000 km from London, our teams had the opportunity of entering FANUC (Factory Automation NUmerical Control), a Japanese company specialised in artificial intelligence and robotics. A sort of sect with a capitalisation of 45 billion, located at the foot of Mount Fuji and particularly secret in its way of functioning. Inside this surprising company, men dressed in yellow build robots and elaborate the software to make them work. During this visit, which continued with the assembly hangars, the extent to which Alan Turing’s intuition was ingenious became clear: it was not men operating, but actually robots building other robots. Only a few rare supervisors ensure the smooth running of the assembly lines where the machines make machines in a curious industrial deconstruction.
Today, more than 90% of the orders executed on the stockmarket are the fruit of operations generated by automatons. No need for an English film or long-haul travel to understand that robots and artificial intelligence are now present in our everyday lives. The finance and medicine segments and even the automotive sector invest massively in these technologies to improve the efficacy of human behaviour. A wonderful inheritance from Mr Turing’s machine.
An inheritance that has become a stockmarket sector in its own right. The robots and automatons sector currently capitalises $480bn overall and has provided one of our most attractive recent performances thanks to the UK company RENISHAW (+33%), specialised in production of measuring instruments.
A stockmarket satisfaction that is well understandable for shareholders seeking ever more efficient economic performances, although an existential question still needs debating: could a computer do without Man one day? Another famous Englishmen (clearly they are strong on the subject!), astro-physician Stephen Hawking, born at the time Turing was encrypting secret codes, resumed the challenges of this race for machine intelligence in his way: “Once man has developed artificial intelligence, this will take off alone and redefine itself increasingly quickly […] Human beings, limited by their slow biological evolution, will not be able to rival this and will be exceeded”.
To be continued…
Didier LE MENESTREL