Soon entering a new year with again new opportunities in the line of work we do. The technology landscape is moving at a pace difficult to get a grab on but we focus on the “normal distribution curve (figure)” as our guideline into the technical landscape.
When we take this approach to the very “buzz” oriented technical world that in many ways all focus and land on the left or right side of the curve above and not where most land in the end… the middle, or more correctly the normal situation.
Having been and still part of the small fraction “parties” in the technology development I must say I am rather amused about all the articles about artificial intelligence (AI), self driving cars and Amazon´s new delivery model using drones.
What is intelligence I ask my self? Entering the facts around it all we come down to the usage of information in hopefully more efficient and for most a more positive outcome. From what I can see we are still in the line of input — compute — output using more “power” than the human intellect. For me this is where technology is at it´s best, analytics and processing huge amount of data and “suggest” a solution based on rational behavior. We are back to the “normal” in the figure above.
The challenge for all technologies to get a grasp of are the irrational behavior. I do not mean this to be a wrong or right, just more on the other left or right in the model above. Call it outside of the box if you want. Many people around the world do not fit the “normal” and thus challenge the main path and also give some trouble to technologies that seek to “take over” ;-).
Now a small note on the drones that Amazon or others are talking about to deliver goods to the homes. Interesting enough at least in Norway there are air regulations that forbid drone flying closer than 150 meters from houses… and we do not like to walk more then 10 meters to the mailbox… call that development..still some stuff left..
Self driving cars are interesting in itself and reading from among others Tesla Motors Inc. whom have gathered a huge amount of traffic data from their sold cars, yes, there are questions to be asked about the usage of this meta data, but here we can look into the database and what this kind of information can give as a starting point. Information is always a good thing when developing technologies and maybe we are closer than we think? It is just the unknown that worry me a bit and that is again the irrational human factor whom is hard to avoid. In the end it is all a risk game…
I really like the technologies that push borders and even if it seems that I am negative I am really applauding the initiatives and going to use more than one of the elements that are hot topics moving forward in the setup I am going to focus on when my notice periode is over in the great datacenter company Bulk Infrastructure AS.
regards
bj