With a new Gartner report suggesting that AI problems will “shut down national critical infrastructure” in a major country by 2028, CIOs need to rethink industrial controls that are very quickly being turned over to autonomous agents.
Gartner embraces the term Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) for these technologies, which it defines as “engineered systems that orchestrate sensing, computation, control, networking and analytics to interact with the physical world (including humans). CPS is the umbrella term to encompass operational technology (OT), industrial control systems (ICS), industrial automation and control systems (IACS), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), robots, drones, or Industry 4.0.”
The issue it cites is not so much one of AI systems making mistakes along the lines of hallucinations, although that is certainly a concern, but that the systems won’t notice subtle changes that experienced operational managers would detect. And when it comes to directly controlling critical infrastructure, relatively small errors can mushroom into disasters.