As an industrial automation and information company, Avid Solutions would like to respond to the allegations of unpreparedness for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in a recent Automation World column from Stephanie Neil, "The IIoT Integrators Are Coming." In particular, we would like to refute the statement that industrial control system integrators as a whole "are not particularly IIoT-savvy." This might be true for other system integrators, but this certainly is not true for Avid Solutions. Our company has a dedicated team focused on smart manufacturing solutions that include smart connected products, cloud solutions, Big Data and machine learning. We are gearing up to fully support this industry as our customers demand the solutions.

Robots will quickly learn to break the law and humans won't be able to stop their slide towards the dark side, experts have warned. Researchers said machines equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) would inevitably discover that honesty doesn't always pay, based on the knowledge they pick up throughout their life. In the future, robots will be able to learn from their experiences, potentially leaving them vulnerable to breaking the law. If they do decide to become criminals, it will nigh on impossible to decide who to charge for the crimes they commit. In an upcoming paper set to be published in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Amitai Etzioni and Oren Etzioni used the example of driverless cars to demonstrate what could go wrong with "smart instruments" – their term for robots which have the ability to learn.

The question of which values should be introduced into the guidance systems of driverless cars has implications well beyond the ethical directions to be granted to these new vehicles. Namely, such guidance is needed for a great variety of robots, machines, and instruments (instruments, from here on) that are already equipped with artificial intelligence (AI)--and many more in the near future (The Economist 2015). These instruments are often referred to as "smart." As Ed Lazowska of the University of Washington put it, "During the next decade we're going to see smarts put into everything. According to Francesca Rossi, a computer scientist at the University of Padova, "Until now, the emphasis has been on making machines faster and more precise--better able to reach a specific goal set by humans.