Who
can’t remember the amazing movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Movie starts with
early hominids realizing how to use a bone as a tool. In the movie, millions of years later space
technology and artificial intelligence (HAL) have become the new tools brining humans
to a challenging voyage to Jupiter…
The
way humans make and use tools is what determine our species evolution, perhaps making it unique.
Well,
softwarization can be seen as the new tool for humanity, offering new ways for
communicating, producing-consuming ICT services, creating the Digital Society
and Digital Economy. In fact, it will be a tool capable of distorting, reducing
space-time dimensions of Digital Society in this data-centric era.
Telecommunications and ICT are making distances are shorter and shorter, and space is being morphed by the
digitalization of objects, things and processes. Causes-effects latencies are being dramatically
reduced, and “control loops” intertwined as in Complex Adaptive Systems. Non linearity
is going to characterize the socio-economic variables of our world.
So softwarization
will bring big changes, as it will allow implementing into reality our cognition models.
In
fact, we’ve mentioned several time that softwarization will allow pervasively
sensing and collecting massive data (by sensors, terminals, smart things,
machines, robots, drones, etc); exchanging data (via fixed and mobile networks
with high bandwidth and low latency); analyzing quickly big data (with Cloud-Edge
Computing) in order to elaborate decisions (e.g., with AI methods, algorithms,
heuristics) for actuating local actions (by any actuators)… That's how a "nervous system" works. And this will boost
pervasive robotics and intelligent machines applications. The
“Second Machine Age” is really coming.
I
believe that, from an anthropological perspective, this is also very much resonating
with what R. Bandler and J. Grinder called “distorsion”, as one of the
processes which allow us to survive, grow, change…a process which allows us to
make shifts in our experience of sensory data. Indeed, future
Telecommunications and ICT services will allow transforming our experiences, digitalizing everything around us.
Also Marshall McLuhan in “Understanding Media”
argues that the web, media, Telecommunications in general are bringing to a
sort of social "implosion", as people and processes are more closely
connected and interworking. This unification, through implosion, for
McLuhan, will allows for the idea of living in a "global village" to
emerge. And emergence is a phenomenon of Complex Adaptive Systems.
But
I think that this "global village"
will be also populated with digital beings such as virtual and embodied agents
or software processes, becoming characters of socio-economic surroundings and
life conditions. ICT is reaching such a level of maturity that it will fade
into the physical reality, merging with it. So it won’t be just a matter of technology records !
Also, it
will be very much important realizing how to make this "complex" merger (of the natural and softwarized worlds) really acceptable from a socio-economic perspective, by addressing issues such as the overall sustainability
and the compatibility, in the respect of Nature.