Just cleaning up some emails and came across this one which merits a second look.
======================================================= The following excerpt is from a speech by Sam Palmisano, Chairman of I.B.M., to the Council of Foreign Relations on November 6, 2008. Palmisano sees three transformative technological trends that have now, in effect, reached critical mass: "First, our world is becoming instrumented: The transistor, invented 60 years ago, is the basic building block of the digital age. Now, consider a world in which there are a billion transistors per human, each one costing one ten-millionth of a cent. We'll have that by 2010. There will likely be 4 billion mobile phone subscribers by the end of this year... and 30 billion Radio Frequency Identification tags produced globally within two years. Sensors are being embedded across entire ecosystems-supply-chains, healthcare networks, cities... even natural systems like rivers. Second, our world is becoming interconnected: Very soon there will be 2 billion people on the Internet. But in an instrumented world, systems and objects can now "speak" to one another, too. Think about the prospect of a trillion connected and intelligent things-cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines... even pharmaceuticals and livestock. The amount of information produced by the interaction of all those things will be unprecedented. Third, all things are becoming intelligent: New computing models can handle the proliferation of end-user devices, sensors and actuators and connect them with back-end systems. Combined with advanced analytics, those supercomputers can turn mountains of data into intelligence that can be translated into action, making our systems, processes and infrastructures more efficient, more productive and responsive-in a word, smarter." The key issue, I think, is whether and how humans can assert control, in their own interest (locally and globally). This is what has been warned against, preached, etc., for the last 30-50 years. It is now upon us, and ideologies or inaction will not work. For the complete text and video of Palmisano's speech, see the main IBM corporate website. =========================== _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
