Ask the Inventor: What Room Does AI Leave for Inventing New Solutions?

Does AI leave room for traditional innovation?

From at least one inventor’s perspective, there will always be room for human contribution, no matter how ubiquitous AI becomes.

This article concludes a three-part video series with Join Ellis, inventor, entrepreneur and founder of Massachusetts based engineering consulting firm Optics for Hire, by asking about his company’s approach to innovation and the impact of AI on his life’s work.

“There are such unexpected connections that I don’t even know that AI would figure out,” Ellis said about the optical competencies his company fosters by making connections between seemingly disparate technologies or applications in ways that no computer program ever can.

Machine Design: It seems that everybody’s an inventor today, thanks to artificial intelligence, which provides foundational models that allow companies or individuals to repurpose or create new solutions. Take us through your creative or innovation process and how your company approaches innovation. Help us understand how you’ve been working all these years.

John Ellis: We have a great team of people who have experience in many different areas. There are a lot of products that we’ve worked on that would seem to be completely unrelated but have application in different areas. It’s having a broad database—a mental database—of how things are done and figuring out if we’re inventing something, that it needs to be a problem that’s worth solving. That’s a big one for inventors—that there’s a market for it, and it’s a big enough problem.

But then there’s the solution part of it. There are such unexpected connections that I don’t even know that AI would figure out. For example, the optical system that we might use for putting light into the brain, where you want a hemispheric light sent out in all directions. The project that we did [see Part 2] that was most similar to that was creating a beacon that would be used for boaters that met the U.S. Coast Guard standard of flares. Flares create pollution, they burn, they can only be used once. So, we had another customer who created a flare that was using LEDs and had to send light off in very specific directions and have certain power in every angle.

That technology—of how we designed a lens to make a flare—is actually relevant to putting light into the brain to fight cancer. So, it’s hard to know where these connections are made.

But because our work is consulting, a lot of the ideas come from outside and there’s somebody else who is coming up with these inventions, and then we’re trying to use the little bit that we understand to help them.

MD: A consistent theme looming around is that the proliferation of technologies will displace the need for workers. There might be some truth to that, but with caveats. Can you comment on how technologies can make people better at the things they do?

JE: There’s a lot of different examples of people having that concern and then it not really coming to fruition. One great example is the automated teller machine. People thought that ATMs would put bank tellers out of work. And even though we have millions of ATMs worldwide, there’s more people working as bank tellers now than at the invention of the ATM.

As things change, different industries become obsolete and new jobs are created, and you hope that there can be ways to smooth that. My office is in a place that was an old mill building where they used to use waterpower to make clothing. And there aren’t any of those factories here anymore. There used to be a lot in Massachusetts.

The best example is that my great grandfather in Philadelphia had a carriage-making factory, and I have a photo I could share, where he is in the middle with some of his employees. That picture was probably taken about 1916. And obviously carriage making was a terrible business to be in in 1916, and that factory went bankrupt. 

And with the introduction of the automobile, there really wasn’t a need for as many people, as you see in that picture employed in carriage making, but what was the invention of the automobile good for the world in general? And did it create employment? I mean, it created enormous opportunities for people making cars, people making roads, people making streetlights, the tourism industry.

So many kinds of things were unlocked by the introduction of the automobile that wasn’t good for my great grandfather’s carriage-making business. But it was great for the world in general. So, hopefully, as innovation comes along, it will unlock new possibilities.

MD: These are fascinating insights. Why don’t we wrap up with you telling us a little bit about what’s happening in your 2024. What can we look forward to, and what do you see across your industry?

JE: Well, we see what comes across our door...we never quite know. In terms of the RollRanger, which we launched last August, we’re hoping to be in more stores and more catalogs and have more customers for that product and solving that little annoying headache for thousands and tens of thousands and, maybe someday, millions of people. 

In the industry, in general, the same things that we’ve been working on over the past number of years from machine vision to robotics and medical devices and medical diagnostics, I expect to still be booming.

We do see ups and downs and trends in our work overtime, but they’re not always visible ahead of time. It’s usually in hindsight that that we see that something that we did was important or part of a bigger trend.

Watch additional parts of this interview series with John Ellis:

Part 1: Inventors Manipulate Light and Optics to Solve Everyday Problems 

Part 2: Behind the Optical Solutions that Help Detect Malaria and Treat Brain Cancer