Cloud: A future invented by you

The following is a synthesis of the comments made by noted futurist Kevin Kelly at the Huawei Cloud Congress, both in his keynote and in an interview with WinWin magazine, edited for brevity and clarity, where he discusses the drivers of cloud, how it is disrupting business models, how it will ubiquitize AI, and how you are, in fact, not late to the cloud party at all – you’re early.

A shared ubiquity

The cloud is going to be a place that most of us will spend most of the day, but we won’t even know that there is a cloud unless it turns off. It will be like air – something that we live in, but don’t really pay too much attention to unless it’s gone. That ubiquity has never really been present before, because it’s a shared ubiquity.

Cloud’s three drivers

The cloud is possible because of the convergence of three factors that are accelerating very rapidly – data, bandwidth, and intelligence.

Data

Data is the one thing that we’re making more of than anything else. Expanding at the rate of 66%, it is literally an explosion. If we measure the surface area of all storage manufactured on this planet, it is actually increasing at the rate of an explosion. We are at the level of exabytes, zetabytes, yottabytes, and we are actually running out of terms. We don’t even have a sense of the scale at which this is happening. We have no idea how to manufacture, to manipulate data at this rate. I would say there’s a tremendous opportunity in this new mega scale for information and data science. Anything that can be measured will be measured, and anything that can be tracked will be tracked. My prediction is that there’s a massive opportunity in these sensors as they get smaller and we begin to track everything. No matter your business these days, you are in a data business. This is how the cloud happens.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is expanding rapidly as well, but the important thing is that it’s going wireless. My prediction is that in a couple of years the total amount of traffic over wireless will exceed the total traffic over wires. Bandwidth is reaching everywhere, even the car. Our new offices will be in the car. Therefore the total amount of bandwidth going to cars will exceed the main bandwidth going to your home. Bandwidth is the secret ingredient – as it expands, so does the cloud.

Intelligence

The third factor is intelligence – AI. I think this is the most important one. There are little bits of AI embedded into computers and robots, but the AI that I think is going to be the most essential will come over the cloud. The robots even will get their AI from the cloud.

Right now, the companies producing the best AI are not selling it as a service. Google, Baidu, Microsoft, Facebook have actually very large cloud-based AIs, but they are private clouds. I think within four years we’ll see companies like Amazon offer IQ and AI as a cloud service like you would offer web service or web hosting. It will be for data crunching, image recognition, things like that.

We don’t really realize how fast AI is increasing these days. AI is better than most doctors at diagnosing x-rays, better than most legal experts at looking at evidence, better than pilots, who only really fly their craft for about eight minutes a flight.

In the last couple of years, AI has really, really taken off. Baidu, Google and Microsoft have AI that is able to take a photograph and look at it and tell exactly what’s in it. Google taught AI how to learn, how to play video games, strategically how to play. And then they taught it how to learn how to play, which is a very profound difference. These AIs are getting very smart very fast. All are being served on the cloud. It’s IQ as a service. You’re just going to plug it in and purchase as much IQ as you want. The more people that are using AI, the smarter it gets. The smarter it gets, the more people will use it.

AI is the killer app. I think that people will want to be on the cloud because it is selling and giving smartness. Even more important, AI is necessary for the cloud and its huge data to make any sense. So AI is necessary to make it work on the cloud and then the main product of the cloud is AI. So it’s at both ends. I think that is so important that it’s going to be the main driver in the next 20 years.

X + AI = Service

We can take X, whatever it is, and try to imagine how you make it a service on the cloud. And that’s going to be the real agenda in these coming decades. Is there anything that can’t be turned into a service? Probably only a few things. There are about 9,000 different cloud-based services trying things like food as a service, furniture as a service, and toys as a service. They’re trying everything. Most will probably fail, but some will work. The next 10,000 startups will be taking something and adding AI to it and making it smarter. That’s the formula, and all this AI is not being generated by the startups, it’s served on the cloud. I don’t think that physical things will go away; it’s just that business model of how you get them will change because the value will often be in their smartness, in their customization, in their suitability to your home or environment. The same things we do with software we’re going to do with physical things. All hardware will behave as if it were software. Take a furnace, and you make it really smart, and it starts to obey the same principles as software. All these things are moving to the cloud. I would suggest that 50% of the apps, even in the next five years, are going to be cloud-based.

The cloud offers so many new advantages. It’s built for scaling. Scalability, low capital, instant startups, easy prototyping, location independence, device independence. Your phone, laptop, tablet, even a big theater, all will be looking into the same cloud, and they’re shared because there’s an ecosystem. And the scope and scale of this is much larger than just having our phones connected. It makes our environment very adaptable, very much more organic, more like an ecosystem rather than a machine. And ecosystem is a good word, because it is much more biological, a better image for when you add all these physical things to the cloud. We have something that resembles a rainforest more than a clock.

Mesh networking

The structure that we normally think of for a cloud is that we have the device, and information goes up to the cloud and comes back down. At the center of this is a big data farm, and there’s equipment by Huawei and others powering this. But in fact, there is alternative structure. The one I want to suggest is a mesh – a mesh version of the cloud. With mesh, communications happen peer to peer. So your phone, instead of going to the cell tower, is actually going from phone to phone, peer to peer. The idea is that you have the communication in the cloud happening at the edges. You have different kinds of things communicating directly to each other – a phone talking to a satellite, a satellite talking to a tractor, a tractor talking to a moisture sensor, with all these things operating in a completely distributed way. This whole thing is what we call the Internet of things (IoT), and this is a different way of doing things, a way we actually don’t really know how to do yet. But I think this is the way we’re going to go, and I would suggest that in 2020, 50% of cloud computing is going to happen at the edges, not going to the server farms.

Distributed everything

If we try to imagine this cloud that distributes services, it’s very challenging, because how do we do something like distributed security? How can you do security if you don’t have somewhere the storing of passwords, safely? How do you do security if there is no firewall? Everything is just on the edge. How do we do identity in a distributed way if there is no place that’s guarding a password? How do you do identity if there’s no central agency to say that this is validated and this is not? How do you do authority if there’s no central guardian? It seems impossible, but in fact we have already an example in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer currency where security is guaranteed not by a bank, but by the distributed accounting of the technology behind the core block chain. A block chain is a very clever way to distribute in a cloud manner; the security, authority and identity of individuals do not reside in any one place. That’s why a lot of Silicon Valley startups and Wall Street are now investing a lot of money into block chain technology, because this is an example of how we could do a distributed service on the cloud. Healthcare, education, making predictions and forecasts, are all things that could be done in a very different way on the cloud, in a way we don’t actually know how to yet, which is why it’s a great opportunity.

Truly global society

So, we have one very, very large planetary cloud, basically, which presents lots of challenges for nations, states, corporations and individuals. How do we run this, because we don’t have experience at this level? In fact, the cloud is expanding so fast that it’s going to exceed even the total computational resources of all humans on this planet very soon. So the future is arriving very fast.

You’re not late

It’s often very difficult to believe the future. If I was to come back and talk about what we have today to someone 20 years ago; they would find it very difficult to believe. Wikipedia? That’s impossible. I think we have to believe in the impossible more often. We have to kind of loosen our minds up a little bit. The other thing that we know about the future is that we are just at the beginning, the day one of this cloud. I can be pretty sure that the greatest products of the next 20 years have not been invented yet. In 20 years, we’ll be talking about things that don’t exist today. And so that means that you get to invent those greatest products. And that means that you’re not late.