SPOTLIGHT
The ghost in the machine
Every industry is embracing the inevitability of AI, which continues to evolve and promises ever-greater autonomy for industrial systems. But how is its impact being felt in the lifting sector? OCH investigates.
shaping our reality. We understand that the algorithms that
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curate movie choices on Netflix, our purchase suggestions on Amazon and our newsfeed on social media are examples of AI at work in our everyday lives, but this is just the thin veneer covering a much deeper effect the technology is having on how business and industry function. The AI age has been a long time coming. Its first dawning came back in 1950, when English mathematician and computer science visionary Alan Turing first started to investigate the question of whether machines could think. His paper, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, presented us with the Turing Test – the imitation game – that remains the benchmark of whether a machine is capable of real thought. That test involves an investigator posing questions to a ‘thinking’ machine and a human in order to determine which is which. If the questioner cannot differentiate between person and machine, then the computer would be judged to have ‘artificial intelligence’. Today, we use the term AI more loosely, as no
oday, everyone is familiar with the term artificial intelligence (AI), and most of us understand that it plays a growing role in
computer has perfectly passed the Turing Test. What we term AI is all around us and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Large language models (LLMs) now power familiar applications – such as ChatGPT, the Perplexity search engine, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini – that are now often used instead of standard Google searches. But it is in the industrial context that AI will have the biggest impact, as it evolves beyond a technology for automation into a tool for autonomous operation.
While the crane industry is not yet handing full control of cranes to an algorithm, the role of AI in material handling is growing, and it is starting to have an effect in many areas, not least safety, predictive maintenance, operational efficiency, stabilisation, automated inspection and optimised load movements. Key to this is two facets of AI: its ability to absorb and analyse vast amounts of data far quicker than any human brain, and its ability to learn from not only historical data, but also real-time sensor data. Wemco, which is a leading name in building and servicing overhead lifting systems, has decades of hands-on experience in manufacturing, installation and maintenance, has seen first-hand how emerging technologies like AI are reshaping the industry. Its VP for
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