In a recent article entitled, “Industrial metaverse, AI set to transform manufacturing”, writer Jim O’Donnell posits that “manufacturing is moving into the industrial metaverse where companies create and run virtual models of physical facilities, incorporating digital twins, AR, IoT and cloud computing.”

“The industrial metaverse will encompass a variety of technologies that allow people to work in the virtual world much in the same way they do in the real world, allowing you to transfer real-world problems into the digital world, execute them, simulate them, optimize them and move them back into the real world,” said Peter Koerte, chief technology and strategy officer at Siemens at the Enabling the Industrial Metaverse conference held in June at MIT.

The basic Metaverse technology building blocks include digital twins, IoT, AI and ML, VR and AR, advanced 5G and 6G networks, cloud and edge computing.

If I had made a statement like this back in 1997, referencing the Internet as a key technology building block for this fantastic new world that was suddenly upon us, I would have been tarred and feathered and thrown on the latest flatbed heading out of town.

Digital twins is not an exciting new approach to smart manufacturing. In fact, it is simply a new way to explain rigorous development testing protocols, even down to its 4 “unique” components: part, product, system, and process.  In the actual world of IT, these are called unit, system, integration and acceptance. Try to get a plant foreperson to shut the shop floor down long enough for a bunch of “analysts” to figure out the components of an undocumented 50 year old process that has been churning product out reliably for most of its life.

And my favorite part of the conference is that there was zero mention of cybersecurity or nation state threats. Zero.

While I love that a large European-based bakery uses virtual Azure tools to instrument their entire production facility, such as ovens and packing lines, it certainly doesn’t qualify as workforce transformation. I am pretty sure that the bakery folks fire up a zoom room when they want to get F2F with the Microsoft folks. Am I aware of MS tools like Mesh? No. I just fell off a turnip truck. But while I know hundreds of CISOs, I know of zero that use it.

The extent that we continue to be drawn to bright, shiny stories about future dark factories is the extent that we will be distracted from working on really hard problems, like OT Cybersecurity.

There was a time when snake-oil salesmen were run out of town.