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Few phrases in the English language elicit as much of an emotional response as “artificial intelligence.”
Imagery of the world being taken over by murderous machines that watch over, enslave, and eradicate humanity has been a pop-culture mainstay since the 19th century.
These days, however, those clichés and metaphors are set aside for very real fears that AI might one day come along and relieve us of our livelihoods.
After all, AI can now drive cars, fly aircraft, help to perform surgery, translate language, write articles… It can even assist in the design of new, more powerful AI-equipped machines, turning the problem into a self-propagating virus for those who fear that one day, they will be replaced.
These fears may or may not be rational, but one thing cannot be denied: Artificial intelligence, in its wide spectrum of applications, is already changing the world around us.
And perhaps the single biggest difference it’s making is one the newspapers have completely ignored — at least up until now.
Science Fact, Not Hollywood Fiction
A few years ago, artificial intelligence was given control of the most basic electronic device known to man.
This first-ever event sparked a quiet revolution. And sometime in the 2020s, you’re going to see evidence of this in every device you own and every industrial or commercial machine you come into contact with.
It will change the way we build electric vehicles, render every single wind turbine, hydroelectric dam, and coal-fired power plant in service today obsolete, and change the way we manage more than half of the electricity we produce.
It all goes back to that simple, primitive electronic device I just mentioned.
It’s the most basic of them all and also the world’s most common, and it’s been with us, virtually unchanged, since the early 19th century.
I’m talking about the electric motor. Invented by Michael Faraday in the 1820s, this crude device, consisting of a spooled copper wire and some magnets, has remained functionally unchanged since his very first prototype.
200 Years Without a Single Improvement
Engineers have made them smaller and bigger and machined the parts with greater precision, but on a fundamental level, they have not altered the design.
Today, more than half of all the electricity humanity produces winds up turning electric motors.
From the tiny ones that make your phone vibrate to the giant ones that drive modern trains and cargo ships, Michael Faraday’s basic design remains dominant.
And the yin to the electric motor’s yang, the electric generator (nothing more than an electric motor working in reverse), has enjoyed a similarly long history of innovative stagnation.
Does that mean these devices were perfect from their very inception?
Not by a long shot.
Electric motors, as well as electrical generators, all suffer from the same defect: They produce maximum torque at a set engine speed.
Speed and Torque: Finding the Balance
Run an electric motor slower or faster than this optimal engine speed, and the torque output drops off, making the motor inefficient.
Same thing goes for the generator. Turn it slower or faster than this constant rate, and you get less electricity flowing out.
This problem has been somewhat addressed by putting gearing mechanisms into the machines driven by motors, as well as into the machines driving electric generators, but because gears themselves take energy to turn, that solution is largely self-defeating.
It is estimated that up to 10% of power is lost to this basic design flaw.
Considering that electric motors gobble up more than $3 trillion worth of electricity per year, and electric generators account for the production of close to $6 trillion worth of power, you can start to see the sheer magnitude of this problem.
Ones and Zeros to the Rescue
So, where exactly does artificial intelligence come in?
Well, it all started when a team of engineers, working at a small tech Canadian tech firm, asked the question: What if we moderated the distribution of charge within that basic Michael Faraday copper coil to adapt to varying motor speeds?
The idea wasn’t to redesign the motor itself, but rather to change the way electricity flowed into it.
This is a software solution to a hardware issue, and it relies completely on artificial intelligence algorithms.
These algorithms, which have been developed and “trained” over the course of thousands of hours’ worth of testing, can micromanage the distribution of energy in such a way that motor efficiency improves by as much as 10%.
And with that massive improvement also comes increased reliability, less wear on the hardware, and a longer service life.
No More Burning Teslas, No More Runaway Turbines
With such a huge impact on existing technologies, you would think that major companies would be champing at the bit to get this technology into their machines.
And you wouldn’t be wrong.
Right now, major industrial and commercial equipment manufacturers are already working alongside this tiny Canadian company to put this technology (called dynamic power management, or DPM) into large-scale commercial machines, such as high-speed trains and wind turbines, and into smaller, consumer-targeted products like a retrofit kit for converting conventional gas-powered cars into electric motor-driven vehicles.
But this is only the very start.
With benefits and competitive advantages of this caliber at stake, it is expected that more and more companies will be lining up to secure licenses for this technology in the near future.
One of them might even go so far as to buy this company outright, a solution that will certainly appeal to the bigger players like Tesla, VW, Mercedes, Toyota and any other carmaker scrambling to keep up with the emerging electric vehicle trend.
A decade from now, DPM will likely be found in millions of devices and machines across the globe. There is simply no escaping it.
Today, however, the company behind it is hardly known to anybody outside the industry.
Which means current shareholders are sitting on a potential gold mine.
The company’s stock is already trading, so shares aren’t hard to get. In fact, you could buy them from the very same device you’re using to view this article.
To get the stock symbol and the rest of this incredible story, click here.
Fortune favors the bold, |
