I was listening to Sam Palmisano’s talk on “A Smarter Planet” as part of the Technology and Foreign Policy discussion at the Council for Foreign Relations — the audio version, because I prefer to not sit at my computer to watch the video. He said that as the world gets “flatter”, smaller and more interconnected, the planet is becoming smarter. Smarter means that …
… digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging.
Three advances in technology are driving this change.
- The world is becoming instrumented: transistor technology is embedded in the mobile phones of 4 billion mobile subscribers today, and there will be 30 million RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags within 2 years.
- The world is becoming interconnected: the Internet not only means 2 billion people connected person-to-person, but also the ability for instruments / devices to connect machine-to-machine.
- Things are becoming more intelligent: since instrumented devices generate data that can be stored and analyzed, advanced analytics enables intelligence that can be translated into action — with nearly-continual real-time updates streaming from supercomputers.
The talk continued with a discussion about how much waste — in energy, gridlocked traffic, supply chain inefficiencies, unsystemic healthcare, and water usage — in the physical world might be reduced through acting smarter. In the pure information world, financial institutions were able to spread risk, but not track risk, which undermined confidence in the markets.… Read more (in a new tab)
I was listening to Sam Palmisano’s talk on “A Smarter Planet” as part of the Technology and Foreign Policy discussion at the Council for Foreign Relations — the audio version, because I prefer to not sit at my computer to watch the video. He said that as the world gets “flatter”, smaller and more interconnected, the planet is becoming smarter. Smarter means that …
… digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging.
Three advances in technology are driving this change.
- The world is becoming instrumented: transistor technology is embedded in the mobile phones of 4 billion mobile subscribers today, and there will be 30 million RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags within 2 years.
- The world is becoming interconnected: the Internet not only means 2 billion people connected person-to-person, but also the ability for instruments / devices to connect machine-to-machine.
- Things are becoming more intelligent: since instrumented devices generate data that can be stored and analyzed, advanced analytics enables intelligence that can be translated into action — with nearly-continual real-time updates streaming from supercomputers.
The talk continued with a discussion about how much waste — in energy, gridlocked traffic, supply chain inefficiencies, unsystemic healthcare, and water usage — in the physical world might be reduced through acting smarter. In the pure information world, financial institutions were able to spread risk, but not track risk, which undermined confidence in the markets.… Read more (in a new tab)
