artificial intelligence
Sergey Tarasov – stock.adobe.com
“The Magic Conveyor Belt: Supply Chains, AI, and the Future of Work,” Yossi Sheffi of MIT CTL Media claims to connect the concepts of the two titles. It’s a frustrating book. Yossi Sheffi is a supply chain expert at MIT. I expected this to be a great book about modern supply chains and how artificial intelligence (AI) can address challenges in the sector. Sadly, I was only half right.
magic conveyor belt
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Transportation and Logistics Center
Let’s start with the fun. The first half of the book focuses on the supply chain. In his two sections, the first of four, Sheffy explains both the basics and the intricacies of his modern supply chain, as you’d expect from the director of MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics. It’s a bit surprising actually. In my experience, it’s very rare for scholars to be able to craft explanations that don’t look like they came out of a textbook. But the author succeeds admirably. In the first section supply he covers the basics of the chain, and in the second section the intricacies and intricacies posed by today’s global infrastructure. It was a great half and created excitement for the second half.
Expectations were not met. MIT is one of the centers of AI development. I hope the author can visit his MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to get feedback on how AI can address the challenges so clearly presented in Section 2. I thought. It wasn’t.
The latter section is the typical high-level cliche you hear about AI over and over again. surely. Yossi Sheffi is willing to admit it destroys jobs, but he can’t. As an example, after talking about partnerships between humans and his AI, he describes an “automated warehouse the size of seven football fields” with four employees.
Another problem is the “logic” that is used immediately afterwards. Remember, AI will remove these simple tasks and leave the difficult ones behind. As I said in this column last fall, how do people learn enough to handle complex tasks when simple tasks are automated? A flawed argument is made on page 190. Until page 277, there is no small segment about the flaws of that argument.
The only tactical discussion on AI in powering supply chains is the later discussion on digital twins, which is only 2.5 pages.
One, most interesting, later argument is Intel’s impassioned account of offering new and exciting career paths as an example of AI creating jobs. That may be the case eventually, but the draft of the book appears to have been written before the company announced several thousand job cuts last October.
What we arrive at is a story of two halves. I think this book is suitable for two classes of people. First, Global Supply He needs a good non-technical explanation of the current state of the chain. I haven’t focused on that, so I don’t know if there is a better book on that subject alone. People who aren’t interested in the fluff in the second half, but want to see the business opportunity well-placed. They can ignore the second half and get business ideas from the first half. However, if you already know enough about this area and want to see how AI can help you, this book is not for you. Yossi Sheffi and he wish he had been co-authored by someone at CSAIL or elsewhere. They could have helped focus his AI section on the tactical details of using technology to assist in this area. It would have made a great book.
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