Growth & Jobs | The gold standard for local enterprises - Man and smart machines working cohesively together

Sean Thorpe, president of the Jamaica Computer Society, believes that the only way to build out Jamaica's niche, globally, is to increase the level of interaction between smart machines and humans as part of the measure for growth efficiencies.

Thorpe told The Gleaner that there has to be an increased capacity within the global market for goods and services in order to become ferociously competitive.

"So as the local enterprises continue to drive the digital transformation of the local industry 4.0 jobs, where the technologies of the smart work environments are built on a cooperation of connection of several Internet of things devices, human interaction as an integral component with these smart interconnected machines is described as 'industry 5.0'," he explained.

"To build productive capacity within the workplace, the move to industry 5.0 now has to become the new gold standard for our local enterprises, while we continue to infuse the use of industry 4.0 technologies," he continued.

Thorpe indicated that man and smart machines working cooperatively and collaboratively can produce twice as much as compared with human capacity alone. He noted, too, that the smart workplace for a future Jamaica will need to become adaptive to advanced human-machine interface interaction systems.

"This will mean improved integration, faster and better automation teamed up with human brain power," he said.

"Where Jamaica is seriously positioning itself to be a part of the 'five-in-four' growth strategy, one deliberate way of enabling this is to move to industry 5.0 production systems. Take, for example, within our manufacturing sector, integration of robotics in manufacture along with advance human-machine interface systems for the manufacture plant can drive large scales of production efficiently.

Thorpe added: "Industry 5.0 also has a lot of opportunities for handling environmental waste systems as industry 5.0 operations can move to have a 'zero-waste' recycling production line collaboration plant, coupled with lower production expenses and reduced waste-management expenses. Industry 5.0 is heavily focused on the human element of manufacture whereas industry 4.0 was predominantly driven by the technology."