Digital Transformation inspired by the Human Body (C03)

The theme is how the human body (HB) contributes to digital infrastructure developments. This article introduces two contributions. The first is reinforcement of design. The second is extending capabilities. This short article explains these contributions in layman terms. Readers will gain some insights which are otherwise not obvious for professional development.

The explanation of the first contribution is based on direct Compucon business experience and not fictitious. At the turn of the millennium, PC business reached a peak level due to the Y2K Bug (Year 2000) which prompted the desire of many people and high school students to understand PC architecture. The author employed the human body metaphor to explain how the various PC hardware components worked together to deliver performance. Obviously, everyone knew that the CPU was equivalent to the brain of the HB and the memory of the PC was equivalent to the memory of the HB. What are the equivalences of the heart, the lung, and the spine respectively? A HB needs food as the source of nutrients, blood to distribute the nutrients to the body, and oxygen to convert nutrients into energy. We can easily relate that data is food from which results of calculation by the CPU are produced. We can also tell that electricity supply is blood since the PC will not work without electricity. The PSU (power supply unit) of a PC is the heart. The PC produces waste in the form of heat which has to be dissipated by fans. There are indeed several fans in a PC. They are the excretion system of the PC.

Compucon is a PC maker. Compucon takes a system integration role and is free to choose the best components to produce the best PC for professional organizations in New Zealand. Compucon was the first local PC maker to produce a PC with twin brains in 1997, the first to use Active Power Factor Correction PSU (power supply unit) for maximizing power efficiency, and the first to create a data storage system with redundancy to reduce the risk of loss of data from 4% to 1%. The PC spine got a major upgrade in the early twenties known as PCIe links. The links connect all external input and output devices to the CPU (brain). Compucon was among the first to use a PCIe-based SSD (solid state disk) for fast computing responses. The human body metaphor has been widely used for assessing the effects of Compucon PC capability enhancements.

The Industry Revolution has entered the 4th era called Industry 4.0 as of 2022. One phenomenon is the emergence of digital twins based on artificial intelligence. Digital twin is the creation of human personality (as well as nonhumanized objects) digitally with a PC. The author has seen an inspiring illustration of a superset digital twin from a GPU technology conference video recording in 2022.

Non-humanized digital twins (NHDT) are indeed the theme of a new Compucon business division for the future. NHDT are the equivalence of their physical or tangible twins respectively. They will enhance the productivity of design, construction, operation, and maintenance of various physical assets such as buildings in real life. They will be PC-based. Creating NHDT will be challenging. The business opportunities will be huge. Efforts based on open industry standards will win. The real digital transformation marathon has started.

We have read about PC, human bodies, and digital twins. The stories pointed out that human stands to benefit from PC in multiple ways. There is no end to this phenomenon for the foreseeable future. Hopefully this article has helped. Please share it with peers and feel free to discuss further.