Automation, deep machine learning, AI, VR – so many things to keep up with, so many conflicting opinions. Let’s explore it for a bit, shall we?
In industrial settings, automation is, of course, nothing new – factories have been relying on it to produce fast goods for decades. Nowadays, automation is pervasive in our society and has replaced dozens, if not hundreds of traditional jobs and careers. An old-school secretary became Siri and she’s in your pocket, a software that handles all your memos and guides you when you can’t find a new coffee shop in town.
One of the first encounters with automation for regular people was the launch of self-service payment kiosks, those boxes where you go and pay your bills or even buy credit for your Steam wallet in order to download games. They’re a handy tool that’s saves you trips to the bank and, of course, time and money.
Then we saw the rise of self-service stands in fast-foods, news services like Reuters using bots to write simple news articles like press releases or incident reports and even one man who built a system to automatically separate Skittles and M&Ms into color groups. We can’t tell you how excited we are about that last one!
But what can automation do for you and your business or future projects?
For a web developer, programmer or, indeed, anyone who works with computers, automation is a god-send for saving time on tedious tasks , time that’s better invested in something with more benefit towards the project. That’s why ClusterCS was designed like this – manage all your servers in one interface, whether they’re based at Digital Ocean, Amazon or in your spare room. That’s also why we offer set-up automation and self-monitoring in case anything goes wrong. Spend less time installing and more time tweaking to ensure you’re getting the most out of your hardware.
Software-wise, get excited for the future, especially after reading Aaron Levie’s predictions for the rise of AI machine learning, digital assistants and trending fields in tech.
“We’ve never actually seen real deep machine learning or narrow AI applied to business problems. It’s just never really happened at any meaningful scale. […]
The technology should be telling you what to do: if you’re in sales, it should be telling you who to sell to. For marketing, it should tell you who to promote to. If you are in healthcare, it should give you suggestions of the potential prescription or the diagnosis that you should have. In manufacturing, it should instantly collapse your supply chain so you know where the potential problems are going to be so you can go right after them.”
Before Dropbox there was Box, a file-sharing service co-founded by Levie. You know him as the savvy entrepreneur who also invested early in platforms like Zenefits, Instacart or Stripe. A public endorser of software like Siri, Levie thinks AI machine learning, another field which ties strongly into automation, is the future of business and an incredible tool for time-saving.
„You just think how much time we all collectively waste doing things that literally require no thought. When you can have the computer do those things for you, now maybe we’ve started to save 20, 30, 40 percent of the time that we have in a given day.”
How about you? What automation tools do you use in your workflow and how much time does that save you? Would you like a smarter Siri in your pocket? Have you tried ClusterCS on your servers? (PS: there’s a free plan available!)
Join the conversation below or on Twitter, we would love to hear your thoughts on this.