An introduction that started out quite well, and ended quite strangely. At least for my tastes. As soon as we have the microphone, I will start talking to you about my hopefully interesting things. I hope that you will find the right balance between what you have been hearing for something that projects you to go out into the future, and something that on the other hand that you can act upon very quickly within our not only lives, but within our means, in days and weeks of time. Perhaps months.
I want to talk about the evolving data sphere, and what will keep us human when we decide and define humanity and human beings in a broad manner. Our human-machine hybrids, our posthuman transhuman successors. I am chairman of H+, I am advisor of Singularity University, I am the founder and chief of widetag. We deal with the internet of things.
We know that answers are easy. What is hard is questions. But finding the right questions and finding the answers is an unevening move of discovery and curiosity that lets us understand why the Romans built a colloseum that survived more than 2000 years after its original life span target. Our planet is going to survive, but it can't survive without humanity quite well, unless we learn to watch what must be on radar.
The radar that I am watching is the internet of things as defined by Bruce Sterling. The world of spimes. The world of evolving devices, where not only do we surpass of thousands and millions of computers, mainframes, mini computers, workstations, we are cut out to surpass the billions of mobile phones in the next generation of devices which will have to be very different in their nature. I want to tell you why.
The granularity of the world that we are designing around, is going to icnrease drastically, when we get billions of devices, to assigning addressable understandable information to tens hundreds and thousands of billions of objects around us. We will not quite reach the possible maximum of the atoms of the universe with ipv6, but we will get very close.
This necessity of drawing finer lines around us, it's very important, but brings with it something that we must be prepared for. Is it it the antonomity that these devices will have, and their decision power. This is already happening around us. And the third is that as these sensors are covering the world, we will gain redundancy that we sorely need, we cannot afford not to have redundancy if we want to achieve our goals.
The way that these devices are going to communicate among themselves is going to be radically different. The dialog that we are having and thriving on is going to be a vanishlingly small percentage of the communication of the planet. We have extremely expensive and extreme devices that were built understanding this, which daunts the surface of the information that don't listen in on what's going on but in a few precious moments.
We've been able to afford to be blind to the world. This will not be the case any more. The sensors that we are building into the products and objects around us are the capital of seeing, understanding and deciding like when a car decides to break if you don't do it by yourself; this is object now, out on the streets, and interconnected nature of the decisions that we have to make that technology .. as rapidly as we can.. must go in lock step with the legal and policy frameworks that have to be developed or else there will be chaos.
There are a lot of people that are working on this already. For example, the roadmap of the next 10 years of intercorporation, as expressed by their chief technology officer, is that of developing claytronic sensor networks, composed of seven billion, seven trillion units (7000 billion units). My company is working on the software iinfrastructures that unprecedented networks need for collecting and analyzing the data from these networks. The reason why this is needed is quite apparent.
In 10,000 years we have gone from representing 1% of the biomass on the planet, together with our house bats, cattle, to being totally the opposite, 98% and more. This is evidently unsustainable, as we start to understand and sense the world, which is today indistinguishable from what we called.. nature, and the technium as well. We must adapt because if not, the world will just as well go ahead without us. So we have things that are going in the right direction. Larry Smarr. There are examples that are current that we can analyze to figure out how to take advantage and leverage all of the expertise and passion that drives people. There are apps that are very exciting yet very challening, like transportation, 4G communications, energy and smart grids, quantified self, healthcare, making people responsible for their own bodies and health, both in the body and in the mind.
And, this is going to take a lot of time. There will be people that will be easily convinced that this cannot happen because their expectations are going for it to happen tomorrow. It will take something like 20 or 25 years to look back and say that we've accomplished what we set out to achieve. It is going to take unprecedented levels of advanced communication, and there's huge challenges by itself in these things.
But what really should happen is something that is going to be very surprising, I think, very interesting. Because we're really living in a broader strange place and time, with earth being a complex adaptive system, in a planetary co-evolution, which we cannot ignore but we have to embrace, for the past 10k years that we have lived here, we didn't realize, we went gone down a path where we are enslaved our machines, when we bring them to be autonomous and self-sufficient, we embrace them to be a part of our environment, our bodies, our decision making, empowering them to shape our civilization. We are going to be free to be human, and more than human again.
Thank you very much.