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John C. Morley (00:09):
Hi everyone. I'm John C. Morley, the JMOR Tech Talk Show host and inspirations for your life.
John C. Morley (01:02):
Hey guys, it is John C. Morley here, a serial entrepreneur. It's great to be with you on another wonderful JMOR Tech Talk Show today being, November 11th. Can you believe we're in the second week of November? I mean, this is going to be crazy. I mean, it's gone be Thanksgiving very soon. And unbelievable. So we have another great show. So definitely, thank you for popping in and checking us out. Really do appreciate that. We have a lot of great guests coming up, by the way, next year. So definitely stay tuned with us for that. And so, I want to let you know that we have a lot of interesting things and, you know, with the holidays and stuff coming, there's a lot of techs that we're going to talk about. But I want to get right into our very first tech, and that is RPA. What the heck is RPA? Who knows what RPA is? What is RPA? Well, RPA is Robotic Process Automation.
John C. Morley (02:18):
Okay, now I've told you what it means, but that might still be a bit confusing for some people. What the heck is an RPA? So it's a process of automation, right? And so, what a lot of companies are doing now is they're coming up with these little kits so people can start to build their own mini if you will, an environment with RPA or Robotic Processing Automation. So, this could be things like unattended bots, automating repetitive tasks without human intervention, and workload management to distribute work across multiple bots intelligently. And you could also deploy to the cloud or to the SAS software of service. And attended bots enable human workers to use bots' on-demand scheduling to manage the time schedule for running on attended bots' concurrent bot execution, increasing scalability to run mobile bots on the same virtual host.
John C. Morley (03:39):
So, when we're talking about bots, we're talking about software that's sitting on either a hypervisor or a server of that magnitude, and it can grow, and that can help an organization. So, when we think about a robotic process, you might be thinking about an actual, if you will, piece of hardware where robots are literally doing things like building cars and stuff like that. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about something completely different. We're talking about software that automates the way we do things in life. And so, by understanding that there's so much we can do, IBM is one of the leaders in this field. And you know, you can go for something simple, from back-office task automation to large scaled automation to handle time-consuming business processes and tasks across a multitude of platforms and economies to handle things like interactions with your clients, customers, vendors, okay?
John C. Morley (04:58):
And automation offerings can really, let's say, span the globe with things of automating stuff in your IT process for your organization. Handling things like software robots that's what we're talking about now. Software robots. We're not talking about physical robot bots; artificial intelligence insights to complete tasks with virtually no lag and enable you the ability to achieve a digital transformation. Now, they claim this is according to IBM, and I quote that a return on investment is 124%. That's quite a bit. They say the payback period is 16 months. So, the implementation of an IBM robotic process automation will fully pay for itself in 16 months.
John C. Morley (06:00):
That's pretty wild. So, they're combining RPA, Robotic Process Automation, and DTO Digitally Transforms Organizations. And by using AI, they extend the RPA to increase business efficiency and improve the customer experience. And, of course, lowering the expense to do that. Deloitte and Touché reduced report preparation time from days to hours to minutes using IBM's RPA; restaurant chains eliminated 2000 manual work hours for a 100 percent ROI in three months with the IBM RPA. Now, IBM's not the only one doing RPA, but they are a pretty big player in the RPA space. And so, IBM's Robotic Cross Automation Bot will help companies set up standards and things like that in a fraction of the time; startups can automate a core process for first-of-kind drug safety monitoring using the RPA process with IBM quite simply.
John C. Morley (07:10):
And so, the thing about RPA is that because you can also integrate AI, Artificial Intelligence, there's a lot under the sun. And so if something changes, you can actually change the way that works quite quickly. And because this is not a physical piece of hardware, it's software; it can be retooled at a moment's notice. And so, if something's not working, the RPA can automatically adapt to become more cost-effective and, thus, obviously more efficient. But what are the downsides to RPA? I think that's probably the big question. Has, you know, John, what is the downside to an RPA? Well, I think the biggest downside is going to be the cost factor. It's going to scare people right away. And so a big disadvantage of RPA is that there's a lot of complexity, and RPA will make it easy for businesses to change the processes as they run, but it's not going to happen overnight.
John C. Morley (08:25):
Okay? It'll make things easier for them so they can have changes in their step-by-step rather than systematically updating the software if something goes wrong. Well, RPA makes it difficult to fix that problem because it's part of an integrated environment. And so, you might be saying to me, John, what are the real disadvantages of RPA? Well, I think we have to look at RPA as a, I think we have to look at it from a couple of different perspectives. There are six major disadvantages. One is attrition. And this is understood because a centralized resource for business and robotic cross-automation can effectively solve the work in automated systems for enterprise, but they cannot replace humans completely. And I think that's great. So we can all rest easy that it's not looking to replace a lot of humans in their jobs.
John C. Morley (09:25):
But for tasks with fixed logic, it makes perfect sense to use RPA; for example, if there are certain decisions that have to be made over and over again, and they all can be basically put into a number of buckets, there can be logically set up to decide which bucket, thus think of each bucket as a separate process, and then what will be carried from there. So, there'll be a significant impact on some of the office staff because they're going to have to adapt to how this works. Now, tasks such as data entry and labeling are often simple and don't require much skill to complete. So, software robots will replace humans to solve them better and faster. But we're talking about things like that because just labeling or printing, there's not much that goes into that. Not a lot of brain power.
John C. Morley (10:19):
And there'll be a large number of workers that will face job loss when we're talking about jobs that have to do with a process that just gets repeated repeatedly. And so, this is going to be a problem for a lot of workers that are at these big companies. And so, we should consider carefully before increasing the number of bots, and enterprises should have a clear management system to better control RPA's operational processes. I think that's a big thing. So you have the complexity. You have a magnification of problematic processes. So, it can be said that the magnification of complex processes is the defect with the biggest consequences of an RPA. In a large process, you will get large transformations executive seated RPA as software assistance in a certain department. However, it may turn things upside down in either a good or a bad way.
John C. Morley (11:25):
RPAs lack creativity; that's another big problem. In a way, we're going to see the lack of creativity in RPA because it only understands programming languages, and it doesn't understand humans or emotions. So, how do we actually avoid the downfalls of RPA? Well, I guess we should take a survey and really figure out what's reasonable with an RPA, realizing that when we talk about RPA and Robotic Process Automation, we're talking about software, which is different than what happened many years ago. We still have robots, but this is now getting to the software level. We test the process to ensure it works correctly in a certain environment before we start spending lots of money and trying to scale this. There are some disadvantages, but there are lots of benefits. I think one of the biggest disadvantages we're going to see with RPA is that many people don't want to make a change. And so if they don't want to make a change, this could impact the success of the company. Now, yes, you can save 40 or 60% in time and money with the software, but is that going to be the image you want? Do you want chatbots on your website and things implemented like Slack and Facebook, and WhatsApp? And this seems great because it can tie things together, but is it going to cause a disconnection between potential clients and existing clients that we've had? Is it going to make them feel like they're a number?
John C. Morley (13:04):
So having a comprehensive, full-featured RPA with advanced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Automation capabilities is really where we're at. And that means that the system will be able to learn how to do a job better. Let's think about Falcon in war games, right? And Charles Falcon, and you know how they use the WOPR; you remember the WOPR and in war games, and who knows? What does WOPR stand for in war games? Does anybody remember what WOPR stands for? It's War Operation Plan Response. So WOPR had a set of games, and one of them was Thermonuclear War. And it basically simulated what war was going to be like, what the casualties would be like without actually having a war. It basically internalized and made the calculations that we learned in the movie is sometimes the best way to win is not to play.
John C. Morley (14:17):
Now, that's not for everything, but I think we learned a lot from war games in the fact that this war operations computer, okay, or as they call it, War Operations Plan Response, was supposed to make life easier. But then, you know, they got rid of the men in the silos because when they were given the order, they had to turn the key, but they then replaced the men and women in those silos, missile silos, and put in a device that allowed the WOPR to be able to control launching the missiles. But let's suppose that the WOPR makes a mistake. You now have all this military weaponry that could really cause some problems. So I think it's good to have it, but I don't think it should be involved in things like decisions that affect people's lives.
John C. Morley (15:26):
I think it's a great tool. And if we're using it in a factory, okay fine, but it should never make decisions on people's safety. It should never make decisions in a hospital or a medical environment, okay? Because let's face it, the War Operations Plan Response was this military supercomputer in that 1983 movie War Games, okay? And remember, the WOPR is something that we think is fictional, but not really because we're starting to see things that are more like this. And it's an AI supercomputer that was used by the US military in this movie, and it was given a voice by a separate device years later, which would be used in the advanced sound card. So pretty interesting. And so, do we really know what we have as a device, or in this case, the RPA management? Do we know what the cost of our operations would be if we screw up and it makes the wrong decision?
John C. Morley (16:48):
It could happen. A wrong decision could cost somebody of their life. I don't think we're in a world where we want to make those kinds of decisions, at least automatically. It might be good to give us as humans feedback to know, hey, this is something we should do, or this is something we shouldn't do based on certain information. However, we should never have the computer make the decision. I'm under the impression that I don't even think we should have the war operations, you know, response computer War Operations Plan Response, make the decision of whether to fire those missiles. I think that's really; I don’t know, I think that's really a problem. And you might be saying, John, how easy is an RPA to use? Well, every company wants an RPA because you know why they want to reduce costs, and they know the biggest way to reduce costs is to reduce manual labor time.
John C. Morley (17:53):
To reduce manual labor time. They have to automate. So they have to spend millions of dollars. But they also know that if they spend 3, 4, 5 million and they're able to cut quite a bit from their payroll, they know that this machine's never going to call in sick. And it has the meantime, between failures of X between billions of hours, it might break down once every couple of years, and the repair for that machine is going to be a lot less money than handling sick days and personal days. So, it is something that is being looked at. And, to jumpstart and scale your robotic process is not something you're going to do overnight. You have to figure out how to execute this in a manual fashion; then, you could figure out how to automate it. For example, if you have a factory and you know that when an order gets placed, somebody has to grab that, let's say, order off of the computer, and they have to go manually pick it, grab a box, pick it, put it in the box, they have to seal it, and then they have to put the label on it, and then they have to put it on the preparation line, and then they have to put it on a truck, and it gets shipped out.
John C. Morley (19:10):
Imagine automating that process so that from the moment the order came through, the system would send it to an RPA, and the RPA would actually have automated assembly lines that would literally scan and look for the appropriate devices using robots or other types of sorting devices that would literally go through, grab the devices that are needed for the order, put them into a bucket, and have that automatically move to the next stage. I think RPA has a lot of benefits; however, we have to be careful that we don't get rid of a million jobs because one thing RPAs are not going to do is it's going to not have any touch with the human-elephant. So, if you're going to use an RPA process, and it's going to be for manufacturing, and you can have checks and balances every once in a while, and even have some humans check to make sure everything is good, it may work fine, and you may save your company a lot of money, but is that disconnect in the way that you handle products to your consumers or business owners, really something that you want?
John C. Morley (20:36):
So, I think you've got to think about that, right? Chatbots, machine learning, virtual agents, interactive voice response that does a lot more than just, you know, hear a number and then, you know, let you dial an extension does a lot more than that. It is literally able to have a conversation with you over the phone, and through advanced speech processing, it can take that information and use it in advanced queries to talk to a database to give you information. Something as simple as finding out your insurance balance or your balance with a vendor or making a decision to pay it. That all use some very sophisticated technology,, and it even has to improve. How many times have you called these systems, and they made a mistake? Like, I think you said no. And even if there's a little crack on the line, you got to go all the way through. And then sometimes, if you go through it more than two times, it's like, I'm sorry, you're having trouble. Please try again at another time. And you're like, well, wait, I need help. We're sorry. Your call's being disconnected.
John C. Morley (22:00):
Pretty cool, right? Not really. That's an example of a system that really is kind of stupid. It is, ladies and gentlemen. It's kind of stupid. And why is it stupid? It's stupid because we're wasting time, and we're frustrating a lot of people. So, in the movie War Games, War Operations Plan Response is nothing more than a system that is able to analyze and make calculated risks and decide how the game should be played. And by playing the game multiple times, it can get better at the war strategy than just running it once now by the program running over and over again and constantly getting better. It can fight the war without ever going to war. And it can give the military personnel the data they need to be able to make decisions in a fraction of a minute because they have the data. But what if the system calculates wrong?
John C. Morley (23:43):
So remember, the data we're given is just data. We may not really have a clear, conclusive way to measure it. We may not. All right? So, our future is definitely going to have RPAs, and IBM, like I said, is a big manufacturer of that. In other news, ladies and gentlemen nanoparticles, will they remove pollution from water? What the heck? What is a nanoparticle? John, what is a nanoparticle? Does anybody know what a nanoparticle is? Have I said to you? What is a nanoparticle? So, nanoparticles are basically very small, teeny tiny particles that range between 1 to 100 nanometers. And as you guessed, they are not detectable by the human eye. And nanoparticles have attributes that are different physically and chemically from their larger material counterparts.
John C. Morley (25:04):
And so, nanoparticles are inorganic-based nanomaterials, carbon-based materials, and organic-based nanomaterials. So the question really comes to play is, can nanoparticles remove plastic pollution from water? So scientists have developed this iron oxide nanoparticle, which is water resistant to coatings. They show that the microplastics in the water actually bind to the particles, which can then be removed by a magnet. Let me say that again. They have shown that the microplastics in the water, okay, bind to the particles, which then could be removed with a magnet. So this is pretty cool. And this is an example of technological innovation. People think technology is just computers. It's not; technology is not just something you use; it's a process. It's thought, it's knowledge, it's innovation, okay? And so, when we think about this and how something like a nanoparticle in combination with other R AND D and technology can be used to remove pollutants from the water, I think that's just really cool; ladies and gentlemen, I don't have any other way to that. I think it's just really cool. And the question is, when will this become a reality? When will nanoparticles remove pollutants from water? When will that happen? Well, as we discussed, they can be used in de-chlorination, de-salinization, and other contaminants.
John C. Morley (27:14):
And the question is, how effective is this? And they're saying it's quite effective because they've done this in the lab. They've done this in the lab. And so if we're able to use technology, okay, to harness a better way to do something, we've just capitalized on the way to make our world better. I think that is so awesome. And if we realize that the perspective of our life and where it goes is all attributed to one thing, people and technology, we keep learning and discovering about it; we'll keep following that for you. But I'm very happy to hear that they have found a way to remove pollution from the water. I'm just really floored by with; I think that's amazing. So here's something, the robot that learns as you walk; what the heck is that all about?
John C. Morley (28:45):
Well, they have this exoskeleton boot, and it learns how to walk to help improve your gate, the step, okay? And so, they have this fine-tuned robotic exoskeleton boot, and you wear it when you walk around, and they're hoping to make these devices more affordable. So, this boot lets you walk faster when using less energy, and it could help older people or those with disabilities move around easier. So, the previous exoskeletons failed to make any leaps into the real world because they need to be fine-tuned to a person's gate over long periods of time. Now that we have artificial intelligence on board, it can adjust and learn. So, the device is being personalized for your own body, and then it can make specific decisions to help you, particularly.
John C. Morley (29:54):
So, you might think that all this is like mumbo jumbo, but It's not. This is something that is going to become more and more of a reality. And so, if this became something that people use, maybe if they needed it in, I don't know, maybe they need it with I'm going to say they might need it as they get older. They might need it after, you know, a rehab or something like that could make a big difference in people's lives. And I'm all for making a big difference in people's lives; I think that's really cool. But a robot that learns how you walk. I'm just, I'm like so floored at this because, you know, when we think about technology, and we know the body is chemical and we know that it's electrical and just even the fact that, you know, messages travel in our body, okay, I know this gets a little off-topic, but it's pretty cool.
John C. Morley (31:05):
And so messages travel through our nervous system, and when there is the break in the nervous system, and there is the space, we have that chemical, okay? So there's a chemical reaction between the space, and then the chemical transforms back to the electrical connection to the other side of the body. So electrical stimulus, then it ends, causes a chemical to react, and then that causes it to go to the other side, and then it turns back to an electrical stimulus. I think this is just really cool because our body operates in a manner of chemicals and electricity. Now that's cool. I mean, that is like so cool. And we are starting to learn that we're a technology and they're things that they can use to help our lives be better. And even to help people that are having issues with either walking or if they have some type of a, let's say, a disability, they could even use those pulses that are coming from the body to cause an electric stimulus to have a prosthetic, let's say, move. I mean, that is just so mind-boggling. So, the message that would travel to move the finger can be reconnected to a prosthetic that would just be reconnected to that same wire if you will go to a signal, and then it knows to move. I think that's just like, that's pretty cool. So, the question you might be asking me is, John, how much does this, let's see, how much does this new AI walking boot cost? Well, is the walking boot covered by insurance?
John C. Morley (33:14):
So, a walking boot used primarily for pressure reduction or lower extremity ulcers is not covered. But if it's something that is medically necessary, such as not being able to move or not being able to use that part of the body, then that would be covered. So they prevent more damage so the area can heal. That's something. But you know, boots back, I'm going to say many years ago, without even the AI ability, we were under a thousand dollars, but how much does a new AI walking boot cost? Millions? Billions? They're saying, okay, that they're going to be able to get this price so low, but how low? So right now, it's kind of like it's in this limbo land where we don't know. And I feel that if enough people get value from this, it's just like the car, right? Or computers. So if only one car existed, the car would be 10 million. But because they can make so many, the car actually costs a lot less. Now computers and technology cost money, but they are a lot less than cars because they make more computers. So, if they actually made a lot more cars, the cost would drop way down. I think that's just; I think that's fascinating.
John C. Morley (35:10):
So, we'll keep track of this robot boot that learns how you walk. That's right. The robot boot that he, that helps you walk. I'm just going to have to see how that works. And I know, you know, you're so excited for each other. How much is this robot AI boot? Well, to let you know, the new humanoid robot that you could one day buy that Mr. Musk is working on is supposed to be $20,000. Okay? So, that gives you some idea, all right? But is insurance going to be covered? I mean, we're going to have to see, and there are a lot of questions. And then we also have to realize that now, because this is medical, there becomes a lot more implications. And is there going to be a new law that's going to be predicated because people are going to become sue happy or because a firm was an update or something?
John C. Morley (36:32):
So I just see this being a little bit of a headache before it becomes a blessing. I'm just being honest. All right, so, lots of great stuff. Is this the end of the street lamp? What am I talking about? The end of the street lamp? What am I talking about? Well, the end of the street lamp. Day in Rosen Guard is actually interested in lighting streets without using electricity. He's a Dutch engineer, and he worked with the State University of New York, and a company called Bio Glow to bring his vision to life. And the plans are to use large numbers of genetically modified glowing plants for a large art installation that will look like a glowing tree. And other engineers are planning on using luminance to light cities in the future. That's amazing. So, in the world and the place we live where many are trying to cut energy usage, this could be a real answer; scientists have already created small glowing shrubs using bio mystery, a method of imitating systems found in nature to solve design problems.
John C. Morley (38:06):
Dan is also interested in how creatures like jellyfish generate their own light. And what can we learn from nature, and how do we apply this to life? I mean, I think this is great because we're learning how nature does something, and remember, we're saying, Hey, this is how nature does it now; how can we do it? How can we take that what's being used in nature and apply it to another area that could be beneficial for everyone? So, he's working with Alexander Krischke, who has already created the genetically modified glow-in-the-dark plant, which will be sold by Bio Glow. And Dr. Krischke makes the glowing plants by splicing jeans from the bio luminance bacteria with the chloroplast Nome from a common pot plant to create a Starlight avatar and emits a light somewhere to the type that's made by fireflies. So, Rosen gar plans on using a large number of plants for a large art installation, as you said, that will look like a glowing tree. It's going to be pretty amazing and fascinating to have these energy-neutral trees but, at the same time, incredibly kind of poetic in a landscape. So, Bio Glow, I should say, the company behind the innovation based in St. Louis, Missouri claims a Starlight avatar is the first light-emitting plant.
John C. Morley (39:38):
Is this fantasy, or is it a reality? It's reality. But how do you take something like this and mass-produce it? That's the part that I think is going to be interesting. So, remember, ladies and gentlemen, technology is not just doing security for a network. It's not just building the greatest car or computer or figuring out what type of prosthetics can connect to the body. It's a lot more than that. It's taking what we have in our world, whether it's in nature, in one dichotomy or another, and we're trying to figure out how to piece that together to work in another discipline. Ladies and gentlemen, I am John C. Morley, a serial entrepreneur. It's been a privilege, been a pleasure, been an honor to be with you this amazing week. I will see you guys next week, which will be the 18th, and we will share even more information because there's just so much that I want to share with you guys.
John C. Morley (40:43):
And I really appreciate you guys taking the time to pop into the JMOR Tech Talk Show. We've been on the year for quite a few years now, and definitely check out believemeachieve.com; we've got so much great stuff there, too. Lots of my articles and so many things to improve your life. And I just thank you so much for taking the time to watch the show, being a part of it, and for making it a part of your life. That means so much to me. Have yourself a wonderful rest of your night, ladies and gentlemen. And you know what? I'm going to see you guys next week. Until then, remember technology is a tool. Technology itself is not good. It's not bad. It's how we as human beings choose to use it. Make sure to use technology for good, and it helps those around you. Have a great night, everyone.
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