I think there are lower hanging fruit in manufacturing than this, although someone more familiar with the industry can tell me how realistic this is. I was spea

I think there are lower hanging fruit in manufacturing than this, although someone more familiar with the industry can tell me how realistic this is. I was speaking to my father-in-law recently, who has helped design production lines his entire life. One interesting thing he said was that companies often have huge investments in machines that are effectively no longer supported by manufacturers. Many of these machines are based on simple circuits or microcontrollers, and their behaviour is more or less fixed at this point. But in many cases the performance of the machine is not optimal, with wasteful pauses and inefficient transitions between parts of a job. It occurred to me that there’d be a reasonably useful business in learning the behaviour of the controllers in these machines, and in some cases it must be possible to just rip out chips and replace them with tweaked versions. I don’t believe the IO can be very complex in this generation of machines (we’re talking various cutting machines etc) but you’d be offering savings of millions if you could build a scalable business tweaking them. One approach to that would be treating microcontrollers as black boxes and just using deep learning to pick up the mappings between inputs and outputs. Anyway, completely idle speculation on my part but free business idea for someone if they thought it was in any way possible, and entirely possible this is big business already.