As Workers Retire, Hitachi Trains AI to Remember Their Expert Skills

pcmag.com:

Hitachi is developing an AI system tasked with remembering the skills of workers who retire so it can train new human replacements.

As Nikkei Asia reports, the Japanese company is planning to use a generative AI to learn and then pass on the "expert skills" required for a number of maintenance and manufacturing jobs carried out by its workforce. Those jobs are spread across industries including railways, power stations, and a whole host of manufacturing and processing plants.

By expert skills, Hitachi means skills it's hard to describe in a manual, such as noticing small irregularities in sound, smell, or the temperature of machinery. In other words, situations that could lead to an accident or serious malfunction occurring and being able to react appropriately before they turn serious.

A representative of Hitachi's Advanced AI Innovation Center explained that the aim is "making it possible for employees to experience past failures and notice in a simulated manner, so that know-how can be passed on to the next generation."

Hitachi's solution for teaching such skills is to project images in a room so as to recreate different working environments. Those environments could be railroad tracks, a nuclear power plant control room, a manufacturing assembly line, or metal processing facility. The AI then projects appropriate malfunctions (smoke, blinking lights, a cave-in) on to the images to simulate a problem and the trainees are tasked with solving the problem. The same system will also be available to use with virtual reality headsets.

Alongside such training, another real-time AI is being developed to help workers troubleshoot problems as they arise. Think of it like ChatGPT, but for very specific Hitachi work situations.