It has been a little more than 10 years, since the post about Technological singularity:
http://192.168.50.2:9010/130/end-day/
Changes happened on some fronts more rapidly, than expected and on some – an interesting twist. Would be nice to review and reflect.
Trends come and go
Cloud
That is interesting one and perhaps my favourite. At the early stages there were mainframes and clients connecting to them. So in a sense cloud (remote) computing. The main driver there was cost efficiency. As time went by personal computer became more affordable and a lot of people got their own. So the computing went almost fully local. With internet we got access to remote servers and compute started to shift a little back to the remote especially with Amazon Web Services starting to offer not just Hardware for rent, but quite flexible platform with variety of ready to use services. The convenience of 24/7 availability and no need to renew own servers all the time played its’ part.
Other players rushed to get on board and promote “Cloud-First” ideas. Till the moment outages started to happen and cost becoming unbearable at time. That is the moment I got to hear for the first time a new term “Mist” which intended to bring some of the compute back to local. For a few years we could observe status quo. So of the companies started to offer Hybrid cloud services (integrating local compute with remote). And not sure where, not sure when – we got the trend lost completely and got overtaken by other hot topics (especially Data-First / Data-Driven enterprise).
As of today, with new super fast and reliable connection (fiber optic cables & 5G) – compute placement is not about money or convenience. Cloud is a daily not-so-hot topic any more. The only question people may touch time to time is which vendor or data centre to pick. What will happen next? I think connectivity speed in future will only even more erase “feel” of something being remote or local.
Internet of Things
IoT, M2M, Digital twin. I do think it is still a thing, but just like Cloud, not something we hear any more about from every corner. The main players here were and still are automotive and other manufacturers, and they keep connecting machinery (as well as products) to internet as much as they can. There some bad and some ugly, where some companies tries to push hard subscription services for “things” people already bought. But there are also good ones – that provide remote monitoring and control as part of the purchase. You just need to do a diligent research before you buy.
One of the problems for consumer is lack of integrations and eco systems. It is difficult to imagine having 10 different apps on a phone to interact with few products from different vendor. The answer here is quite simple and quite the same as before – do you research and it will be fine.
Machine learning
Big Data, OLAP, volume, velocity, gravity. This and other terms you could meat looking at almost any presentation about big data. Machine learning is not, per se, a super new concept and mathematical basis existed for a while but it started to truly shine with the compute power we got. The ML itself got a bit shadowed by rise of Generative Pre-trained Transforms. However the data aspect in its simple form – collect all the data you possibly can and make a statistical trend out of it, is still around.
The problem with ML is that tools make it quite easy to start. But reducing error and working it out to perfect is a challenge on a whole another level many come unprepared for. At the same time many familiar things (Speech to text) as well as GPT itself is nothing else than Machine learning techniques.
Other side of the coin
Too many talks about AI replacing people and ungrounded beliefs that anyone can do programming because of modern tools and self-proclaiming prophecy that a lot of (financially interested) people push towards us – makes things a bit bitter. And thus difficult to admire and appreciate. Is it a bubble we live in and it will pop if not today than tomorrow? I don’t know.
High hopes
I wish to believe we come up with a way to shift focus and discussions from greedy aspects of the progress towards how automation can improve and simplify our day to day routines. I wish to believe that instead of people loosing jobs due to poorly budgeted corporate expenses for chips, we find a way to make a work day shorter yet more productive and give people more freedom. I wish to believe that technology will help fight difficult deceases. I wish to believe…
Links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
- https://www.amazon.com/Human-Race-Future-Could-Happen-ebook/dp/B083XH9X8R?keywords=the+human+race+to+the+future&qid=1579668067&sr=8-2&linkCode=sl1&tag=lifeboatfound-20&linkId=2163aa2b76aa44c3c723928120dcd83e&language=en_US
- https://www.the-digital-insurer.com/library/the-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2014-gartner-research-article-by-david-w-cearley/
- https://epoch.ai/blog/what-will-ai-look-like-in-2030
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