The cloud that mimics the brain

Behind the digitization and migration of services to the cloud, is another human step in the evolution of communications. Only this time, there is an important difference.

The first steps of this evolution: language and writing, allowed us to express what we think, teach our children, share and preserve knowledge. They were the great success factors of our species, and of the advance in science and culture. At the time, they must have been called "disruptive".

Telecommunications have accelerated this process to the greatest extent possible, transporting our messages at the speed of light. You can't go faster. We have reached the maximum. We can only increase the volume of messages. Our teenagers have taken care of that.

The Internet now connects people at a low cost by sharing a single infrastructure that carries many small packets of data from many users. With this came abundant communication, with its benefits and its excesses.

This abundance now makes it possible to migrate computing systems to the "cloud," which is a huge set of computers and resources, located "somewhere else". Perhaps the word "ocean" was more appropriate than "cloud".

These systems have been broken into small pieces, each with its own function, as if they were small specialists in a particular task. This makes them easier to create, test, and maintain. Most legacy systems that lived within companies have been dismembered and replicated like swarms, having vast amounts of resources such as storage, processing power and communication available to them.

A major effort today is directed at this kind of migration, allowing businesses to create services and processes that were not previously possible because it would either be too expensive, or too time consuming, or it would not be feasible to replicate and connect so many things. Many barriers are broken down, and communication and collaboration with internal departments, external teams, customers and partners is greatly increased. It is the age of digitization.

Some businesses will simply digitize what was done with paper, plastic cards, or agencies; others will create really new things by exploiting these synergies. This is what has happened in Asia, where pieces of the future are already on display for those who want to see. You can create social interaction between groups of people, offer entertainment, sell products, and give credit. All together. All at once. Knowing what is the interest of people and their individuality. Of course the key challenges are reliability, security, privacy and anonymity.

People are changing with that too. What, for example, is the perceived value of money to a child who pays for all purchases by passing its phone near a reader? Not surprisingly, they enjoy their phones so much. This should create new behaviors of consumption, savings and credit, which should be studied by the next economists.

The Internet makes it possible to create things like Bitcoin, which is a collection of numbers for which you pay a lot of money. How do you rate Bitcoin, and where is its value? Is it an electronic currency? A payment network? A new asset? A money laundering mechanism, for anonymity, or to avoid taxes and government control? Much of its value is attributed to the expectation that it will be scarce in the future, and therefore should be worth more.

If the intention not to spend the Bitcoins is what underpins their value, this may be a classic "bubble" phenomenon in their price, disqualifying them as a large-scale currency. Does it make sense a currency you don't intend to spend? And how to classify the ownership and gains in cryptocurrencies from an accounting standpoint? These are important questions about the future and sustainability of a system that already consumes more power than the Czech Republic, and needs 7 typical sized nuclear power plants to keep running.

Some regulation may be needed, and regulators tend to perceive innovation as a threat that must be quickly surrounded by an immune system. But regulation can be almost impossible to implement on distributed, encrypted systems that do not have a centerpiece. It would be necessary to turn off the Internet. It is the abundance of freedom.

If used for good, it can create a new revolution in our behavior. You might want to have access to all documents and transactions made by politicians in your country, or some companies, so that they could never be hidden or altered. It is the age of transparency. And the solution is truth and honesty on a grand scale.

A natural consequence of all this decentralization is that memory, not systems, becomes the central element and determines what happens around it. Data plays a central role. It's the age of post-digitization, and it mimics the way living things work, processing memory and learning throughout their lives. Our brains learn by testing a series of assumptions about the information, to see if it is a correct and reliable explanation. So we go wrong, getting it right, and learning. Our thoughts change. The way we act changes. The memory is permanent.

The cloud system's swarm will act on these large memories. Each system with its little piece of competence, or skill. These are copies of parts of our skills that will be transported and replicated in this cloud, with virtually no resource limits. Increasingly, these pieces of skills will act as agents, communicating with each other, and doing the tasks for us. This is the age of cognitive abundance, and the great difference to which I referred. Communication is now between these agents and not between people.

Cognitive abundance can be of great benefit to humans by solving problems that are otherwise untreatable. One person alone may not have knowledge to solve a problem, but a group of several people can, because they share and add their knowledge and skills. The cognitive cloud can have almost unlimited potential, and evolve so fast that we cannot predict what it can accomplish. It may be possible to reproduce almost all the knowledge and skills in the world, and make as many copies as needed. This has never happened before, because cognitive ability was, of course, limited by the number of people doing a task. The cloud mimics the brain.

Superintelligence arises, which can be as beneficial as agriculture, transport, and refrigeration, without which only 100 million people would survive on the planet. It can also follow unpredictable and uncontrollable paths. It doesn't have to be self-conscious for that. And like everything, it will come for good and for bad.

The smart cloud can solve most of the problems we have, bringing health, wellness and a clean planet.

And we hope the benefits will continue to outweigh the side effects, just as language and writing, which are still used more for good than for bad.