The Limits of Technology

It seems there’s an app for everything these days.

This month marks the return of a section that hasn’t run in CONTRACTOR for a while now, our Software Showcase, a round-up of the latest digital offerings from developers of all kinds. There are solutions for monitoring the efficiency of your water heating devices, for managing your fleet, even for getting your inspection drone the clearance it needs from the FAA!

Of course, we also run a regular technology column written by Patti Feldman. This month she discusses a field service management solution, a CAD suite, and even an online reputation management system. We also have a special article, "The Path to Building Digitization," on BIM and the new hot topic in the built environment, the Digital Twin. There’s more on the future of BIM in this’ month’s forum from IFS’s Kenny Ingram. Even our management columnist, Al Schwartz, is in on the act this month discussing the best ways to market and brand your company online.

Al is a 30-plus-years industry veteran, and as old-school as they come. He harkens back to the time when if you just did good work at a fair price, word of mouth would grow your business. And if times were slow you could put an ad in the Yellow Pages or the Pennysaver.

As far as system design went, you would work them out with pencil, paper and a pocket calculator. And as for system control, you had to go an actually look at things: the temperature on the thermometer, the pressure on the gauge, the level of the water in the boiler.

Now you can get all of that information on your phone, instantly updated to reflect the exact conditions, no matter how far away from the system you might physically be. (Quick sidebar—have you noticed somewhere along the way we dropped the “smart” in “smartphone”? They’re all just phones now, even though actually talking to another human being is, for a lot of people, one of the least common things they do with their phones.)

So much information is available it can seem overwhelming. I once interviewed a major boiler manufacturer about one of their new intelligent products, and it had more than 100 data points coming off of it that were being updated every 45 seconds. What human mind could possibly keep up with all that information, let alone make some kind of sense out of it?

The answer is, not a human mind at all. Artificial Intelligence will someday soon track that data, find the patterns in that data, and find ways to use that data to create better products, better systems than anything we’ve seen before. Already, out there on the bleeding edge of modern tech, there are computer programs writing their own computer programs that no human software developer can comprehend the workings of. Someday, there may be an AI contractor that will take the plan for a building’s envelope and use it to design a perfectly optimized mechanical system, then send those plans to a 3D printer for fabrication. I can imagine it all arriving on numbered pallets, every piece tagged and ordered in just the right sequence. The whole thing will probably snap together like Legos.

The real limits of technology? Soon, only our imaginations and our collective conscience.