Making sense of the Cloud Alphabet Soup...
In recent months and years, there has been an abundance of new acronyms created to describe a technology revolution that is taking place all around us. Some will call it by the Cisco-led IoT (Internet of Things) name; others by it's counter-movement of ToI (Things on the Internet). The business world has been grappling with the "as a Service" (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, XaaS) movement, while others more in the consumer-focused world have been trying to wrap their heads around SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud).
While you could spend hours, days or months (really) reading books, blog posts, and internet forums about what this alphabet soup of acronyms actually means, I'm here to propose a new acronym to describe it all, hopefully in a more simple and elegant way: TeWoL - the Technology-enabled Web of Life.
I use the "Web of Life" terminology quite intentionally for a number of reasons:
- It's everywhere (or soon to be): It is already in every industry and available in every aspect of life for those in the connected world. It will soon be accessible to everyone... thinking Google balloons/Facebook drones
- It has an inherent dichotomy: good/evil; philanthropic/nefarious; Much like the way the internet has been found to have a bright side (connecting universities & researchers across the globe to enable collaboration never before imagined) and a dark side (the extra-legal world of the likes of "Silk Road" enabling the vices of the world), the TeWoL has the potential for great good and great evil; unbelievable philanthropic opportunities and nefarious behavior that few would admire and most would deem resulting in a net negative effect on the world.
- E.g. Davinci surgery machine vs. hacking a pacemaker
- All personal financial data and tools at your fingertips (Mint, Bank Apps, etc.) vs. Opportunity for immediate financial ruin (Bank cybersecurity breaches, ATM hacks, Identity Theft, etc.)
- It's not static, always evolving, and some may even say 'alive':Consider that there are:
- 300 Million of new photos uploaded to Facebook every day (source: Gizmodo)
- Gartner believes that there are ~4.9B "connected devices" in 2015, ramping up to 20B by 2020 (i.e. in the next year, the number will pass number of humans on this Earth...and never look back)
- Devices can talk to devices to make decisions for us: ITTT platform and the multitude of shrinking and available sensors and 'smart' devices out there.
- While some may say that we can't control technology with our minds, we're not too far off (biomechatronics research/inventions of Hugh Herr at MIT).
In the first movie of the trilogy, Morpheus describes the creation of the Matrix..."At some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI..." Ultimately, this achievement resulted in a dark vision of a post-apocalyptic struggle between man and machine.
On the other hand, the symbolism of Eywa, and the Tree of Voices/Tree of Souls in the movie Avatar paints a much more optimistic vision. Grace describes the ecosystem on Pandora as "A global network, and the Na'vi can access it, they can upload and download data, memories; at sites like [the tree of voices]". However, unlike the Na'vi who require a 'queue' (braid-like tail) to connect into Eywa, anyone today with a smart phone and a data connection has a comparable power.
Sitting here with 4 bluetooth-enabled devices on me simultaneously talking to each other, and constantly pushing my data up to multiple 'clouds', I'm fully stuck on this web, and quite happy to be here. Which new connection I create on this web, or which 'spider' I encounter next, I don't know. But, like the big bang of physics, I know that its a force that won't be stopping any time soon.
The real question I pose to each of you is: "Where in the web are you, and what do you want to happen next?"
