I stumbled on a forecast released by McKinsey’s Advanced Institute on 12 technologies that will (might?) transform the world in the next decade in terms of impact on life and economics and I would like to share it with you with some comments from my side.

The 12 technology areas identified by McKinsey’s Advanced Institute

- Mobile Internet is already a reality. What is happening is that in the developing world where no fixed lines are available in the mass market (and most likely will not be widespread and pervasive also in the next decade) the access to Internet will be wireless, hence mobile. What I see, however, is the growth of a “mobile culture” in the sense that everybody will get used to be part of the Internet, will consider Internet (its information, services, links) as an integral part of their life. We will likely forget that we used to have manuals, and we will probably forget that we used to learn dates, how to do, and so on. Quite seamlessly we will just get what we need when we need it. Planning will be a thing of the past, in many areas of the everyday life.

- Automation of knowledge work is something that has been taking place in the last 200 years since the industrial revolution. The point is that we are shifting the meaning of “knowledge” (and intelligence). Centuries ago knowledge was about how to do things and it seemed at that time that a machine could not learn how to do thing, could only be a prosthetic augmenting the “mechanical” capability of a person, nothing more. Well it turned out that machines learned to do things and would increase their capabilities over time to the point of doing certain things better than an artisan, and for sure in larger volume at lower cost. We felt that playing chess was a matter of intelligence and that a machine would not be able to stand against a good player. We were proven wrong and we decided that actually playing chess is not based on “real” intelligence…. We have psychological problem in comparing ourself with machines because we are NOT machines.  Well, in the next decade the major shift in my mind will be the cultural acknowledgment that we ARE machines developed through eons of evolution. The outcome of the Human Brain project will be disruptive in this cultural sense, even more than in a technical sense (enabling new computational structures…). Hence the automation of knowledge work will just be another step in the increased sophistication of machines. What the futurist Thomas Frey  says “One common fallacy is that people are being replaced by machines. The reality is that machines don’t work without humans. A more accurate description is that a large number of people are being replaced by a smaller number of people using machines” does not resonate completely with me. My opinion is that this was true in the past, for the future I would say that the increased intelligence in machines will on the one hand replace people’s intelligence and on the other hand will challenge people to increase their intelligence, thus enabling new opportunities.

- Internet of Things is again already happening under our noses, although under the thresholds of our perception. More and more things are directly or indirectly connected to the Internet and the data generated are being used to create a larger map of connected objects that is virtualised on the Internet. This process will clearly continue in this and in the next decade and indeed I share the feeling that in the next decade we will have a mirroring of most of the objects made of atoms into objects made of bits and residing on the Internet. This mirroring is opening up a new dimension, the one of the Internet WITH things, IwT. We will be able to interact with both the objects made of atoms and the ones made of bits and the boundary of one vs the other will tend to fade away in our perception. Actually, most services will leverage the object made of bits because it is easier, and cheaper, to work on bits.

- Cloud technology is commoditising a good portion of IT and it will likely continue to do so in the rest of this decade. In the next decade what I see is that the pervasiveness of IT will create a global fabric where a significant portion of services and information will be spread out, thinly, at the edges, in objects and devices, in what is starting to be known as “the fog”.

I’ll continue to examine the remaining technology areas in the next posts.

I am attending a meeting this Saturday on the Digital Agenda and I listened to several talks and discussion on how important Internet and the Digital Society are for the well being at Country level. The people at the meeting where seasoned (read “old”) guys like me and they all looked convinced of what they were saying.

Yet, although I concurred in what they said, something made me feel uneasy, there were bells ringing but they sounded fake.

And then it hit me. There is a cultural divide and an economic divide standing in the way as a giant, but invisible boulder, blocking the path so clearly depicted.

Just few days ago Internet went down (the access to Internet) in my home and my two kids still living at home got sad, angry and then “moved out” of the home looking for connectivity “for free”. For them Internet is an essential component of their life, something that cannot be separated from it. As in the cartoons here (credits: http://cramdodge.com/life-when-my-internet-doesnt-work/) there is little life left if Internet is not accessible.

Notice also that for them “free Internet” is the same as “Internet”. They both have a smart phone providing access to Internet for free up to 1 GB (which means I pay for that) but living on Internet requires many more GBs. Hence, from their point of view no access to Internet means life stands still!

In trying to fix the problem I discovered that the issue was a flooded pipe causing a lower impedance in the twisted pair connecting all flats in my building. And I discovered I was the lucky one, since other flats started to experience problems a month ago (and still suffer from it). Well, I talk to the various dwellers and I clearly noticed a trend: the level of “anger” was inversely proportional to the age. In a flat there was a web company and they were really angry and told me they were suing the Provider, but they were copying with the failure using wireless access.

This is what I consider one of the real issues facing any Digital Agenda: a culture divide between those in charge of implementing the Digital Agenda that have lived without it and those that are already living in the digital world where the Digital Agenda has already been implemented. It is tough to build something that you are not really experiencing at a cultural level. You always have the escape hatch saying “well, that can wait, you don’t really need it, we can still do as we did,…”.

The second aspect that was often mentioned in the talks is the efficiency that a Digital Agenda will inject into the overall system with great benefits to all. Actually, this is not true!

Inefficiency is a VALUE! There are plenty of companies and individuals that are making money toady because the processes are inefficient. If you leverage what technology can offer to make processes more efficient you are cutting the grass under those companies and individuals feet. And you can bet they are against this. Having an eGovernment for sure decreases the cost of Government but this saving is due to the decrease of clerks! And you cannot enjoy efficiency if you are the one being downsized to create such efficiency.

Over time both these boulders will be removed. It is just a matter of time. We wouldn’t be able to live in a world as it was 200 years ago, and that world had a completely different set of cultures and efficiencies (and ways of thriving on inefficiencies).

The Digital Agenda is not about designing a new world, is about accelerating a transition towards something that already exist.

I still remember reading as a boy the Jules Verne adventure of Nemo and its submarine. And that is what came to my mind reading today of the 550,000 miles of undersea cables, each one about five cm thick, zipping terabytes of data across the Oceans. There are also satellites providing connectivity across the globe but their contribution to the global connectivity is about 1% (and decreasing…).

Internet seems to most of us as something that just exists, and often we feel it as decoupled from the telecommunications networks.

In fact, Internet could not exist without the telecommunications network!

In the map you see these submarine cables linking the continents (and you can also get a very detailed map if you fancy).

It is interesting to notice that a number of these cables are future proof: in the past once a cable reached its maximum load the only option was to lay another one. Nowadays, optical fibre can increase their capacity by replacing the optoelectronics at the ends. This is much cheaper than laying a new cable and keeps the pace of optoelectronics evolution.

What we are now starting to see is that the telecommunications network, at the logical layer (protocols) is relying more and more on Internet so that by the end of this decade the two of them will probably become synonyms.

It has become a habit for me when making reservation in places out of the beaten path to ask if there is Internet connectivity. And I might decide for a hotel over another because of Internet availability.

The Lego Robot controlled from the Space Station by NASA to test new protocol mechanisms

Now, I am not planning to spend my next vacation on a Space bound capsule, even though next year we should see the first tourists going in the Space (wealthy tourist only…) but, still, I was interested in seeing a news from NASA of a successful experiment they perform last month to bring Internet to the Space!

If you are flying through Space, or taking a walk on one of Saturn moons, accessing Internet is not just a matter of having a strong enough signal that can reach the Earth. The IP protocol has some characteristics that are not fit for interplanetary communications.
NASA wanted to test some alternative protocols to see if an Internet like communications can be sustained and, curiously, they chosen to test their ideas involving equipment whose cost goes into the million and million of $ on a robot developed using Lego bricks, as shown in the photo on the left. The “spending review” is affecting NASA as well!

The goal was to find a protocol that can resist to the absence of links. In Space the density of links is not, and will not for quite a long time, … dense and it is not like on the Earth where if a link goes down the IP reroute packets on the next available one…

This has led engineers to design a very robust system that can store packets in case no links are available at a point and provide automatically to forward them as a link becomes available.

I wonder if this approach will not be applicable also to the Internet of Things and to mesh networks dynamically rearranging their connectivity structure to cover those cases where the connectivity breaks down. A bit like in complex system/small world paradigm where the overall system can degrade graciously (and hence IP can work) when links are lost but at a certain point, like in a transition phase, the network all of a sudden splits into not connected island (and here the IP will fail). One can imagine that each of this island could act as a repository to freeze communications till a connection to another island becomes available…

A bit like what has always happen in our communication when somebody tells you: “say hello to Ann, once you see her…” and you might keep this task in the to do list till you meet Ann or till you see a common friend and ask him to pass on the message.

Nothing new, in a way.

First it was the Internet of Things, IoT, where Things can connect one another to exchange information, also known as Machine to Machine, M2M. Then Things are seen to become part of the internet on the same footing as Information and Services and People use Internet to dialogue with them, the Internet with Things, IwT, of whom I am a great supporter, since I feel that from a biz and social point of view the IwT are a game changer.

Now, Cisco is talking about the IoE, Internet of Everything, that to a good extent is pretty similar to the IwT but makes a step forward by taking an holistic vision where Internet is the ubiquitous fabric for our life and our world.

As objects become smarter, thanks to embedded electronics, communications capabilities and sensors, they become aware and change their behaviour according to the perceived context. Since we can be part of their context, our presence can change their behaviour.

The figure on the left, taken from the Cisco Blog where they are introducing the concept of the Internet of Everything, shows the links among people, things and data, all regulated, de facto, by processes (that is the way interaction happens).

Actually, in perspective, I would say that there will be little difference between “data” and “things”. At least, this is my vision.

What I see is a fuzzy boundary between atoms and bits. Sensors enable the transposition of atoms into a mirror image made of bits. Operations carried out at bit level are so much cheaper than the ones taking place at the atoms level, hence most services will take place at the bits level. Then, the services will have effect on the atoms, so the circle is completed.

In this view, data are representations, and they can represent atoms or “themselves”. The way of interaction is the same, and the computation that can tae place is the same. Besides, the now old concept of data encapsulation in a way transform a data (set) into an object that can have an independent existence and can be manipulated, aggregated with other objects but still maintains its own identity.

The Logo of ADay.Org

It started many years ago when taking a picture was all about “film”. 100 photographers in the USA were asked to take pictures in each State during a week. That is why it was called USA 24/7: photos taken at any hour during 7 weeks.

Then Internet and digital photography became mass market and America 24/7 was opened up to the public. Anyone could take pictures over that specific week and send them to a central place where theory were analyzed and a few selected to be published in a book. In the week of May 12-18, 2003, tens of thousands of Americans took shots of what they considered highlights of daily life and generated some 2 TB of pictures. An amazing volume of storage at that time, and an amazing amount of transmission over the Internet.

Out of that a book was created and you can still get it on Amazon.

Now it is ADay in the world, a testimony of the spread of Internet and digital cameras all over the world.

Capture daily life on May 15th 2012

On this one single day we ask you to pick up your camera and help us photograph daily life. What is close to you? What matters to you? We will connect your images to images from all around the world, creating a unique online experience where photographs will be shared, compared and explored. Your view on life will be preserved to inspire generations to come.

On May 15th, as you see on the clip I cut from the ADay website, you can take a picture with your camera and send it to the organizers. How many people will do that? A million? I think it will be more, will see what the statistics will be on May 16th.
However, even a million snapshots makes for  some 5TB, considering a mix of photos taken with a reflex camera, more likely to be used by people that aim for nice pictures…, and pictures taken with cell phones. By the way, I hope the organizers will publish also the statistics about the “tool” chosen for taking the pictures.

What is of interest to me is the possibility to cluster and involve all people of the world in a task. Communications and the Web have changed our social relationships, as I mentioned two days ago they have warped space and time.

Studies on collective intelligence as well as those on autonomic systems are pointing to a yet to be explored wold of knowledge and possibilities. The GAIA paradigm so far applied to ecology will be extended to include the GAIA of minds and I find this particularly fascinating.

Soon complexity and dynamism of Internet will reach a threshold beyond which collective intelligence and other amazing properties will start emerging, like it happens in colonies of insects (think about the wonderful collective self-organization of a termites nest) or even more in single living systems when the web of neurons increases more and more. Sooner or later we should start considering the Internet and future network as living systems. How learning the way to shepherd these networks ?

Internet and Neurons Networks: what similarities ?

 I’ve concluded my last post elaborating about the importance of modeling the dynamics of a complex network in its phase space in terms of trajectories changing over time, and specifically about the need of understanding the dynamic relationships between the states of different areas of a network. For example, mining the distribution of data associated to the network states it will be possible identifying in the phase space domains of attractions and the related critical parameters (this is valuable for easing management and control).

 In principle this sounds to be a little bit complicated, but have a look at this paper:

http://www.cog.brown.edu/Research/ErsatzBrainGroup/resources/EBP2006.pdf

 In order to simplify the model of a brain-like computer (human brain is composed of on the order of 10¹⁰ neurons, connected together with at least 10¹⁴ connections) they have used Network of Networks [NofN] approximation. They have assumed that the basic neural computing units are not neurons, but small (around 10³ -10⁴ neurons) attractor networks i.e. non-linear networks (modules) whose behavior is dominated by their attractor states that may be built in or acquired through learning. This is like to say that interactions between networks can be approximated as interactions between attractor states. In other words the interactions between said modules are similar to the neural networks unit except the fact that scalar connection strengths are replaced by state interaction matrices.

 Even if the scope of the paper is speculating about programming techniques that might be useful for working with parallel, brain-like computers, my take is that this NofN methodology is valuable for modeling future Internet dynamics. But there is one more interesting aspect that should be noted: in these NofN structures, information processing can take place by the propagation of patterns of data related to module attractor states: doesn’t this look like a way to embed computation into a communication network itself or, the other way round, transforming communications from mostly synchronous to asynchronous ?

The “fibre rush” around  the end of last century has created an abundance of optical fibre that today are laying in the ground with no one using them. The evolution of technology, making it possible to multiply fibre capacity by using more wavelengths, seemed to have condemned these dark fibers (dark because not illuminated, not used) to remain inactive for very long time.

But now Internet 2 (a USA consortium) and the Energy Science Foundation are starting to use these fibers for experimenting what a network sustaining 100+Gbps traffic can do for research.

The new Network based on unused dark fibers

The network connects many US research Centers and the goal is to have researchers working on new ideas, including new protocols, that may provide the future backbone for the Internet beyond 2020.

In Europe we are also looking through several projects, mostly funded by the European Union, to the same timeframe and the proposal for GEANT that is now being finalized to be presented this fall is part of this view.

It is not just a matter of experimenting with higher network capacity or thinking about what services, not possible today, can be enabled. It is also a matter of understanding that the more capacity is available the higher chances, and possibility, for hampering the network and whatever is connected by it.

Possibly, security is the one area that has been looked less in the early days of Internet and the problems are now well clear. Not the solutions though. So it is just appropriate to have issues like security being considered at the very beginning of a new Internet cycle.

The photo used by Technology Review to mourn IPV4

On February 3rd, according to a news posted on Technology Review, IPV4 run out of addresses. You can no longer ask for a new address to identify a server, a computer, a cell phone or a fridge.

True, as it was done in the past, you can still use the gimmick of NAT (Network Address Translation) where a single IPV4 address is assigned to several devices in a dynamic way but this solution is not going to work for the coming Internet of Things where, according to Ericsson we can expect 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020 (and this is nothing compared to HP forecast of 1,000 billion sensors by 2020).

The problem lies with the 32 bit address used by IPV4. The problem fades away with IPV6, since it uses 128 bits address.

Now, at first glance, moving from a 32 bit address to a 128 doesn’t seem to make that much difference (unless you are a mathematician…) but it does indeed! With 128 bits you can address several thousands “things” per each square meter of the Earth and this might be enough for the foreseeable future.

IPV6 has been around as standard for several years now but ISPs have been reluctant to move from the well established IPV4 to IPV6 but now that we have run out of addresses they will have to move on.

And the adoption of IPV6, although it will probably take few more years to become ubiquitous, will fuel the connection of objects to the Internet and their citizenship on the Web.

And this is what interest me most. We are going to see a real mirror world up there in the Web where every object in principle will have its corresponding image. And that image will be used by third parties to associate information and services. Who will be providing the management infrastructure for this mirror world. My hope is that Telecom Operators will take the lead and accelerate this transition.

On the eve of the new year I stumbled on an article on the growth of Internet. But it was New Year eve and I just put it aside. Yesterday, I picked it up again and I think it makes for a good reading. So take a look at it.

Getting closer to the inflection point

Basically, it points out that although many people in the world are not yet connected to the Internet and we are seeing an increasing growth there are signs that this is going to change in a short while, as soon as this year, 2011, someone says, or in 2013 at the latest. That is the time where the growth reaches an inflection point, a point where each year after that will see less and less people joining with respect to the previous years whilst so far has always been more joining year after year.

As shown in the figure on the left, the time of the inflection point is tied to the assumption on the final penetration of internet users, if we assume a (unrealistic) 100% the inflection point may happen in 2013 whilst it may happen this year if the final penetration ends up to be 80%.

Of course these are theoretical curves and the real ones may differ (as they differed in the past -see the white line representing the actual growth) but it is anyhow important to take note that an inflection point is due any day now.

The importance relies on the fact that along with the inflection point comes (soon after that) a change in the market dynamics. From an explosion of business we are likely to move into a consolidation, which is what has happened (still evolving) in the telecom area.

After the big bang are we going to see a big crunch? May be, but -may be- we have already had a big crunch, it just went un-noticed because of the parallel expansion. There have been hundreds (thousands) of internet companies that went out of business but they are, in general, so small that we hardly notice.

This may change after the inflection point as the ecosystem will see more and more aggregation taking place (is the emergence of the AppStore a first indication of this aggregation?) and at that point it will be easier to notice any crunch.

Will see.