Doc - OK. I think the cloud is a much bigger deal than anyone thinks. It's not "just computers on a network". The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. A convergence of technologies that have been evolving over the last several decades and which are still evolving at an accelerating pace. We hit moores law in silicon, but mastered the technology of mass deployment and spread it out across the world;
- data centres are pushing down the cost of compute cycles and storage to effectively free levels from the perspective of consumers; the costs to consumers will eventually be so cheap that it will be like background noise to us
- the leaf nodes are also becoming increasingly powerful and cheaper to manufacture, another trend that will continue to accelerate; how long will it be before people start being given free leaf node devices? When will we see the first single-chip smartphone - everything in the phone pcb integrated into one device? It's bound to come, and when it does it will cost just a few dollars to buy;
- a ubiquitous high-bandwidth wifi network that is global in scope, connecting you personally everywhere in the developed world and much of the undeveloped world; 5G is like having a gigabit ethernet with you all the time, 6G and beyond even faster
- image sensors and audio recording can capture every aspect of our world and make it available to us wherever we are; google streetview is a very early prototype; how long before immersive VR lets you travel virtually in a way that is just like being there;
- the massive deployment of billions of microprocessors into every conceivable area of our lives; and processors being implemented in new technologies like plastic, even more cheaply than silicon, still connected to the cloud; people are already working on this stuff
- cloud is an enabler for whole new industries, like autonomous transport, always-on ever-present personal AI assistants, Bill Gates "information at your fingertips" vision on steroids
- the scope for potential new applications is astonishing; I think we have only just begun to scratch the surface in tems of thinking about the types of things that can be done with this new infrastructure
- possibly dystopian nightmares like recording every moment of our life experience, mass surveillance, already we see China deploying a social credit system; let's hope it doesn't come to that
- if the internet was a second industrial revolution, this might be the third industrial revolution
- as with all technological developments, the outcome could be heaven or it could be hell; that's been true since we started making stone tools
- is the singularity a real thing? Or human augmentation? I don't know, but it seems we're getting closer to a place where these kinds of things might be possible;
- and from a longer term perspective, will this technology help humans to survive on this little ball of rock where we appear to be engaged in the headlong wholesale destruction of the host ecosystem? The anthropocine mass extinction is taking place during our lifetimes.
We are in the middle of a decades-long process that started arguably with the invention of the transistor. Have a listen some time to what people like Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil have been saying for years. And on a somewhat darker note, check out Zbigniew Brzesinski's ideas about the technotronic era. When you're busy working in the field, sometimes it's interesting to look up from the screen and look around. We live in interesting times
