I have a theory that Cloud Computing is the biggest thing EVER happened to humans: bigger than invention of fire, wheel, agriculture, automobiles, and even Internet. When I mentioned this to a friend a couple of years back, he thought I am crazy and he didn't see any obvious connection between what was happening in IT (webex, salesforce etc.) to human evolution.
Crazy as it may sound, I feel cloud computing has all the hallmarks of science-fiction, and will accelerate human evolution like no other technology ever did before.
By Cloud Computing, I mean ubiquitous utility computing - ability for anyone in the world to utilize huge amounts of computing power at any point in time at prices that are much cheaper (than what they are right now) - very similar to voice-calls offered by the current telecommunication industry.
While I am not an anthropologist, I believe technology has a strong influence on how we evolved and it is what made us a dominant species on earth.
Crazy as it may sound, I feel cloud computing has all the hallmarks of science-fiction, and will accelerate human evolution like no other technology ever did before.
By Cloud Computing, I mean ubiquitous utility computing - ability for anyone in the world to utilize huge amounts of computing power at any point in time at prices that are much cheaper (than what they are right now) - very similar to voice-calls offered by the current telecommunication industry.
While I am not an anthropologist, I believe technology has a strong influence on how we evolved and it is what made us a dominant species on earth.
- Use of fire - helped us move to colder regions, cook food, and protect from other animals. There is a new theory that cooking food is one of the factors that contributed to increased human brain size (cooked food provides more calories than raw food, and requires fewer calories to digest - coupled with the fact that brain uses the maximum number of calories).
- Use of tools - helped us hunt better, reach longer distances, and protect better from other animals (a knife cuts much better, spear/arrows help kill from longer distances).
- Domestication of animals - helped us with improved food supply (hunt bigger animals, provide meat, milk, transportation etc.). It is no wonder one of the current metrics for energy is horse-power.
- Advent of Agriculture - helped us get predictable source of energy, forced humans to form larger groups and work towards the collective, and resulted in quite a number of other changes (development of larger villages & towns, languages, religions, culture & tradition, social hierarchy, governments, specialization of trade, development of art, science etc.).
- Use of coal, fossil fuels & electricity - resulted in industrial revolution, and all the good things we see in the world today including light-bulbs, refrigerators, heating & cooling, automobiles, airplanes, ships, telecommunications, industrial machinery, and all the other good stuff.
While I don't have the numbers for it, I am sure each of the above changes brought about increased human activity (population) & domination to where we are now.
At a fundamental level, I believe there are 2 things that are required for any entity to survive:
At a fundamental level, I believe there are 2 things that are required for any entity to survive:
- Energy required for self preservation (food & shelter, procreation, taking care of offspring)
- Knowledge required for self preservation (acclimatization, where & how to get the above energy)
We have done well in one area so far i.e. finding new sources of energy (most of the technologies mentioned above: fire, tools, domestication, agriculture, fossil-fuels etc.), but not as great in the second area (knowledge).
The biggest source of knowledge is our genes - which supposedly haven't undergone radical changes over a long period of time. The next source of knowledge comes from our ability to communicate & teach (through language & writing and recently printing-press, telecom & world-wide-web).
I believe that cloud computing enables us to accumulate, store & retrieve enormous amounts of knowledge, and thus provides a big boost to the second area (i.e. new sources of knowledge).
As humans, our ability to synthesize large amounts of data/information, store the knowledge and retrieve this when required is very limited - out of the hundreds of thousands of people we encounter - in airports, shopping malls, conferences, train-stations, movies, TV-series; we can barely remember 1000 faces, and a cheap laptop computer these days can do a much better job than that.
We know we don't know the answers for lot of things happening around us. We don't know how human bodies work, we are still trying to understand the basic structure of our genes, we don't know how our brains work, there are thousands of diseases that we weren't able to find cure for. We still don't know all that is happening on our planet: we can't predict the weather, earth-quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes & volcanic eruptions; we still don't know all that is happening under the ocean floor, we still don't know what is happening under the earth's crust. We still haven't explored our planetary system, our galaxy and the vast universe that we are part of. And we don't know what we don't know.
I believe Cloud Computing will provide the economics required to create huge compute facilities - that will enable us in the end - to understand better about our biology, our planet, and the universe; and in the process possibly create new/better energy resources (which in turn can help the pace of evolution). A car gives us a 200 horse-power (or 200 horses at our disposal) - energy that we can use to go wherever we want; think about cloud giving each of us 200 additional human brains - knowledge that we can use to understand everything better and to make better decisions. I am sure we will have more Einsteins going forward.
I believe - Cloud Computing will positively impact every aspect of how we live: enable governments to do better centralized planning (e.g. building cities without traffic jams), corporations to improve productivity, common people to improve their health (and other aspects of their standard of living) etc.
Another industry similar to Cloud Computing in its evolutionary impact (on a smaller scale) is Telecommunications. While telecom did have a profound impact on how we live our lives (think what will happen if all the radios/TVs/mobile-phones/ATMs/POS-counters in the world suddenly stop working); it took more than 100 years to get to where we are now. Most of these early telcoms are state-run or state-sanctioned monopolies, operating in strong regulatory environments with very little incentive for innovation; and that slowed the pace of innovation and its impact on humans.
Each one of us should hope/pray that Cloud Computing will not take the same route taken by the telecom firms - we should hope this will turn out to a vibrant industry with lot of competitors - innovating in ways to bring cloud computing to everybody in the world.
The biggest source of knowledge is our genes - which supposedly haven't undergone radical changes over a long period of time. The next source of knowledge comes from our ability to communicate & teach (through language & writing and recently printing-press, telecom & world-wide-web).
I believe that cloud computing enables us to accumulate, store & retrieve enormous amounts of knowledge, and thus provides a big boost to the second area (i.e. new sources of knowledge).
As humans, our ability to synthesize large amounts of data/information, store the knowledge and retrieve this when required is very limited - out of the hundreds of thousands of people we encounter - in airports, shopping malls, conferences, train-stations, movies, TV-series; we can barely remember 1000 faces, and a cheap laptop computer these days can do a much better job than that.
We know we don't know the answers for lot of things happening around us. We don't know how human bodies work, we are still trying to understand the basic structure of our genes, we don't know how our brains work, there are thousands of diseases that we weren't able to find cure for. We still don't know all that is happening on our planet: we can't predict the weather, earth-quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes & volcanic eruptions; we still don't know all that is happening under the ocean floor, we still don't know what is happening under the earth's crust. We still haven't explored our planetary system, our galaxy and the vast universe that we are part of. And we don't know what we don't know.
I believe Cloud Computing will provide the economics required to create huge compute facilities - that will enable us in the end - to understand better about our biology, our planet, and the universe; and in the process possibly create new/better energy resources (which in turn can help the pace of evolution). A car gives us a 200 horse-power (or 200 horses at our disposal) - energy that we can use to go wherever we want; think about cloud giving each of us 200 additional human brains - knowledge that we can use to understand everything better and to make better decisions. I am sure we will have more Einsteins going forward.
I believe - Cloud Computing will positively impact every aspect of how we live: enable governments to do better centralized planning (e.g. building cities without traffic jams), corporations to improve productivity, common people to improve their health (and other aspects of their standard of living) etc.
Another industry similar to Cloud Computing in its evolutionary impact (on a smaller scale) is Telecommunications. While telecom did have a profound impact on how we live our lives (think what will happen if all the radios/TVs/mobile-phones/ATMs/POS-counters in the world suddenly stop working); it took more than 100 years to get to where we are now. Most of these early telcoms are state-run or state-sanctioned monopolies, operating in strong regulatory environments with very little incentive for innovation; and that slowed the pace of innovation and its impact on humans.
Each one of us should hope/pray that Cloud Computing will not take the same route taken by the telecom firms - we should hope this will turn out to a vibrant industry with lot of competitors - innovating in ways to bring cloud computing to everybody in the world.
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