Pots to implants and potential prosperity
I HAVE often talked about the fact that my grandmother, Vho-Tshianeo, even though she could not read or write, was my first engineering teacher. She used to make clay pots with impressive artistry. She would go with me to the river to collect the best clay she could find.
This is what in engineering we call materials selection. Artificial intelligence (AI) procedures such as ant colony optimisation are used for materials selection. AI is a procedure for making machines intelligent. Ant colony optimisation is a procedure that is derived from the research of Afrikaans writer, Eugène Marais, who studied the ways ants build complicated ant hills.
These days we can use the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technology, 3D printing, to make clay pots.
As for Vho-Tshianeo, she would put her pots in the sun to dry. After that, she would put them in a furnace.
She would then allow them to cool slowly. This process of slowly cooling the pots is called annealing.
Annealing is such a powerful concept that an AI procedure called simulated annealing is used to find the shortest distance between two locations. She would knock each pot and listen to its sound and, based on the sound, determine whether it was a good or bad pot. The process of listening to the ringing of the pots is called sensing, and when there are rings from many pots being listened to (sensed), we call this sensor network.
The sound of the pots was transferred wirelessly (without a wire) to Vho-Tshianeo’s ears to be processed by her brain. We call this wireless sensor network, and the brain is replaced by an AI procedure in the 4IR. If the sensing device is buried inside the pot, we call this embedded sensors. Because this entire process involves sensing and distributing the sensed information wirelessly to a data bank for further analysis and action, this is called the internet of things (IoT).
Recently, on August 28, South African-born Silicon Valley-based engineer Elon Musk unveiled a brain implant that measures the activities of the brain and sends the information to a central database where it can be analysed. Similar to Vho-Tshianeo’s pots, this brain implant is embedded in the scalp to sense information from the brain. Furthermore, it can activate different parts of the brain.
It then transfers the information wirelessly to some device, for analysis and further action. The implications of this embedded brain implant technology on the health of individuals are far-reaching. With this data from the brain, we can track blood sugar levels, tumours, epileptic activities, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s and much more.
The IoT involves sensing, distributing, analysing and actioning. Data is sensed, in the case of Musk’s company, Neuralink, by an implant. Then data is transferred wirelessly to a central place, such as a smartphone or cloud, where it is analysed using tools such as AI. The knowledge then extracted from the data is used for action.
If the application is in health, and the data analysis reveals something wrong with the person from whom data was gathered, the information is relayed to a doctor, and an appointment is automatically made.
The applications of IoT are vast and include machine health monitoring, pollution monitoring, landslide detection, forest fire detection and water quality monitoring. We should invest in technologies such as IoT so we can lead our country into prosperity.