Another way to look at the metaverse and RPA: the artificial world, parallel employees, and RPA
From the metaverse to the parallel employees, the virtual and real division of labor promoted by the artificial world is good for RPA
Robots are iron camp plate human beings are flowing water soldiers, and the future meta-universe of the virtual real division of labor RPA has great opportunities
Text/Wang Jiwei
The metacosm is a virtual space parallel to the real world, which has been widely recognized by everyone.
Since the invention of the Internet, this parallel space has been born. After the Internet was opened to the civilian market, human beings continued to migrate to this virtual space. In the more than twenty years since the development of the Internet, human beings have acquired various knowledge through interaction with this parallel space, and the relationship between the Internet and human beings has gradually upgraded from connecting people and information to connecting people and services.
With the maturity and application of mobile Internet, Internet of Things and other technologies, human beings have basically realized normal connections with parallel spaces. Even if you don't have wearable equipment on you, your mobile phone, which you have to look at from time to time, can upload your behavior data to the servers of various apps anytime and anywhere.
In the view of Wang Jiwei Channel, human production, life and even survival have long been inseparable from this parallel space, which has always existed and continues to affect us.
This parallel space has been called differently by different periods. When cybernetics was first proposed, the space was called Cyberspace, later called mirror space, and later became a major element of cyberpunk fiction: "Oasis" in Gamer 1 and "Metaverse" in Avalanche.
Now we have entered the era of web 3.0, and the metaverse concept has quickly become its embodiment after its popularity.
In today's cyberspace, netizens are watching and eating melons is the most common thing. In the future, with the development and improvement of blockchain, VR and other technologies, coupled with the trend of virtual economy and the commercial promotion of various organizations, everyone will participate in more work, entertainment and activities in the metaverse with a stronger sense of immersion.
Some people will have rivers and lakes, and if there are rivers and lakes, there will be order. The real society needs all kinds of governance, and the space where virtual space and virtual reality are integrated needs to be controlled. Therefore, parallel space always has to move towards parallel control, parallel management and parallel functions in the end.
Thus, the cybernetic essence of "managing people like controlling robots, and controlling machines like managing people" will also become the true meaning of the metaverse.
From the "Three Worlds" to the Artificial World
While the metaverse is being more widely recognized, the concepts of physical world, virtual world and virtual-real fusion world are also being accepted by more people. And when it comes to multiple worlds, many people think of the philosopher of science Karl Popper's famous "three worlds" theory:
Karl Popper believes that there are three worlds in the universe:
World 1: is the physical world, including matter and energy;
World 2: It is the world of subjective knowledge, that is, the world of consciousness and subjective experience, that is, the mental world.
World 3: It is a world of objective knowledge, including the products of human spirit of the theoretical systems such as culture, civilization, science and technology recorded and stored by various carriers.
In order, there is world 1, then world 2, then world 3, and the three worlds are interactive.
World 1 and World 2 are easy to understand, but World 3 will always make people ambiguous, will there be a third world in the physical and psychological worlds? Carl Popper saw the Third World as an objectively existing world of knowledge, meaning that it was a virtual world capable of objectively recording all kinds of knowledge.
Recently, at the China Intelligent Industry Development Conference with the theme of "On the Transformation of Digital Intelligence" initiated by CCTV and the authoritative departments in the field of artificial intelligence, Professor Wang Feiyue of the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences directly called the third world the artificial world.
The artificial world is the artificial world, which is not a simple artificial intelligence world, but a world created by the combination of computer technology, Internet technology, virtual reality and other artificial high-tech technologies. The artificial world is a computer science and technology term published in 2018, but its sense of existence is far less impactful than the term metacosm.
The artificial world is similar to the world 3 defined by Carl Popper: it is neither a physical world nor a subjective world, but it can be used to record and store the products of various human spirits.
The "three worlds" theory was born in 1967, artificial intelligence was really born in 1956, and it stands to reason that if Popper knew enough about this field, the world 3 in the three worlds theory might be directly defined as the artificial world, which may have something to do with the fact that most of his doctrine tends to philosophy.
The development of the artificial world promotes the automation of knowledge
Wang Jiwei believes that the world 3 in the "three worlds" theory can be equated with the artificial world in contemporary times. Professor Wang Feiyue has put forward this idea as early as around 2014, and it has been increasingly verified in recent years.
Professor Wang Feiyue believes that from the physical world to the psychological world to the artificial world, the it is related to the IT technology of the three eras. The physical world corresponds to industrial technology in the industrial age, calling it "old" IT; The mental world (cognition) corresponds to the Infomation Technology, which is called "old" IT; The artificial world corresponds to the coming era of intelligent technology, which is called "new" IT.
"Old" IT solves the problem of resource asymmetry, "old" IT solves the problem of information asymmetry, and current "new" IT is solving the problem of intellectual asymmetry.
New and old IT technologies are constantly changing, but also interacting with each other. The first two technologies have brought the physical and psychological worlds to the end, and now we have to develop the artificial world, so artificial intelligence is hot, and IT has become "new" IT. In the artificial world corresponding to the new IT, it can be done in any field of "making something out of nothing", and can simply achieve low cost, high efficiency and high intelligence.
When the transportation network, information network, energy network, Internet of Things, and intelligent network composed of various technologies connect the three worlds of vanity and integration, our world will be very different from the past.
In the future, after a series of technologies such as web3.0, blockchain, and VR are skillfully applied to the three worlds, various automatic, autonomous, orderly, and decentralized DAO organizations will be automatically generated, and human society will naturally enter the Industry 5.0 society, and the era of knowledge automation will truly come.
Knowledge automation creates a virtual and real division of labor
The term knowledge automation was puzzling when it appeared in McKinsey's 2013 report, "Looking Ahead to 2025: The 12 Disruptive Technologies That Will Determine the Future economy." McKinsey has great admiration for it, and put it ahead of technologies such as cloud computing, robotics, and additive manufacturing.
Knowledge automation is defined as knowledge workers such as lawyers, designers, doctors, etc., who will have a lot of work to do through software. This explanation, at first, only caused extensive thinking but did not cause waves, after all, modern organizational operations are based on IT architecture, software is the basic application of informatization.
But IBM Watson's brilliant performance at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2016, and the fact that Google AlphaGo beat top human Go rivals in 2017, further challenged the limits of thinking about machines and software.
All of this stems from the practice and development of "knowledge automation".
Knowledge automation is now defined as an intelligent software system that performs knowledge work tasks. Knowledge automation models various industrial technology systems, then transplants the model to the intelligent design and manufacturing platform, and through the platform, to drive a variety of software, including design, simulation, calculation, experimentation, manufacturing systems, etc., so that the machine can complete most of the work that originally needed to be done by people, and the people can complete advanced creative and decision-making work.
For example, the problem of reusable design. Many engineers design a product from scratch, when in fact modularizing the product in large quantities if they can apply grouping techniques. Then when engineers design a new product, the efficiency will be greatly improved. Only in this way can engineers spend more time innovating.
The mission of knowledge automation is to liberate people from repetitive work. In the view of Wang Jiwei Channel, the artificial world in the three worlds is exactly this thing, which replaces the repetitive work of a large number of human resources through intelligence, digitization and automation, so that human beings can do more decision-making work and give full play to the importance of human knowledge.
With the improvement of the artificial world and the complete realization of knowledge automation, the virtual and real economy will further take shape, and the division of labor in human society will inevitably move from the division of labor between man and machine to the division of labor in virtual reality.
The virtual and real division of labor gives birth to parallel employees
Knowledge automation solves the problem of the division of labor between man and machine, or the connection between man and data, and between man and knowledge.
Through the opening of the three worlds, AR, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other technologies through the operation and refinement of data from different worlds, under the continuous optimization of models and algorithms, the three worlds as a whole will be transformed into an intelligent, automatic, safe and sustainable intelligent ecological new world, so that the real space and parallel space can better blend, and then create a more diversified and prosperous virtual real economy, that is, the ultimate picture of the future metaverse of major manufacturers.
In fact, behind the automation of knowledge is the limit of the division of labor between man and machine. Human organizations under the professional division of labor cannot achieve higher efficiency, and the emergence of new technologies such as steam engines and electricity immediately produces a human-machine division of labor. In the current man-machine division of labor, people and machines can not withstand higher work intensity and improve efficiency, it is bound to usher in a new division of labor model, and the virtual and real division of labor will also come into being.
The virtual and real labor union organically combines the real scene, virtual space, operation, strategy, etc., transforms the disorder of the physical space into the order of the virtual space, and then affects the real scene through the virtual space in turn, thus forming a closed loop, and then each organization can create the core knowledge automation.
Through knowledge automation, the division of labor between virtual and real based on human-machine collaboration and virtual-real symbiosis can maximize the efficiency of man and machine, and then exert greater value in the environment of virtual and real integration.
At the same time, the virtual and real division of labor based on parallel space will also create a new type of work - parallel employees, generally referring to people who work in collaboration with parallel space robots, and in the future world where virtual and real are blended, everyone will be a parallel employee.
Parallel employees, human-machine collaboration and RPA
In the future, as a parallel employee, there will be at least one software robot working with you, and even more hardware robots will work with you.
Speaking of which, what comes to mind? Yes, many RPA vendors now portray a vision of the future as "one robot per person."
From the three major manufacturers of UiPath, Automation anywhere, to the domestic manufacturers Laiye Technology, cloud expansion technology, real intelligence, shadow knife, etc. have been actively practicing this vision with specific actions, they are trying and innovating in terms of product ease of use, developer ecology, etc., which is making more and more business personnel become civilian developers.
Wang Jiwei believes that the development of software automation to today, RPA that integrates artificial intelligence, low code, process mining and other technologies can be regarded as the culmination of it. The core of knowledge automation is to maximize the liberation of human resources and enhance the efficiency of man-machine division of labor through human-machine collaboration, which is self-evident for the importance of the virtual-real division of labor in the integration of virtual and real.
The focus of knowledge automation is automation and intelligence, and RPA, which has many advantages such as less investment, easy deployment, fast results, non-intrusive, etc., as one of the best tools for current human-machine collaboration, its large number of applications have an irreplaceable role in promoting knowledge automation.
It can be said that the "availability of RPA for everyone" is enough to accelerate the rapid popularization of knowledge automation, and the virtual and real division of labor of various organizations can be quickly realized, and naturally it can create stronger competitiveness in the future metaverse.
In the future, everyone's work will work with the machine to work together in the state of human-machine collaboration, and everyone will become a "parallel employee" in a parallel space. And you may not dare to go to a company that is not a virtual division of labor, after all, no one is willing to let the company use you as a "supercalculant".
Therefore, the future company will no longer have the so-called traditional enterprises, there is no so-called online and offline, the virtual and real labor union wrapped all organizations collectively towards the meta-universe.
Professor Wang Feiyue has such a sentence in the sharing: the virtual knowledge robot employee is the iron camp, and human beings are just soldiers of the flowing water, because we will jump ship, take leave, retire, get sick, and the robot employees will always be there.
This means that in the future, various virtual and real fusion organizations will be born based on the "parallel system" composed of various robots. From the perspective that RPA is now becoming the main solution for process automation, RPA will surely become one of the most powerful human-machine collaboration tools in the process of building a "parallel system", and will become a deep participant in the creation of "parallel systems" in the future.
As a result, the future value of RPA will also be magnified again by the metacosm.
[Wang Jiwei Channel, focusing on TMT and IoT, focusing on digital transformation, business process automation and RPA.] 】