An economy that’s based on knowledge (2)

Ike Señeres

MANY of the original Disk Operating System (DOS) users before were so impressed when the Windows operating system came out, only to realize that Windows was actually “sitting” on top of DOS. While it was true that Windows became the new knight in shining armour, it could not be denied that without DOS to “sit” on, there would be no Windows to speak of in the first place. The truth is, the original DOS users had more flexibility in using Windows, because it was very easy for them to go back to the command line everything there was a problem with Windows. I like very much this analogy of what is “sitting” on what, because it enables me to visualize what is higher than the other.

Many people have asked me where the Cloud is, and I jokingly tell them that it is between heaven and purgatory. In our youth, we are told that heaven is a place, but even then, we do not exactly know where it is. On the other hand however, we could clearly say that the Cloud is not a place, and yet we could vaguely say that we know where it is. Simply put, we could say that the Cloud is a system of many servers located in many places all over the world, or shall we say it is a system of many server farms all over the world, interconnected to each other in much the same way that the Internet is a network of networks that is interconnected to each other via Internet Protocol (IP).

For all intents and purposes, it could be said that the Internet of Things (IOT) sits on the Cloud, extending the argument that there would be no IOT if there is no Cloud. That is as far as online computing is concerned, because IOT could actually exist even without the Cloud, because machines could talk to each other without the cloud, because basically, IOT is the so-called machine to machine (M2M) communications, as opposed to what emerged earlier, the so-called people to people (P2P) communications. To go higher in the ladder, I would now say that Big Data “sits” on IOT because it is IOT that collects the bits of data that ultimately becomes Big Data. Needless to say, we should also add that Data Analytics “sits” on Big Data.

Going even higher, we could say that Business Intelligence (BI) “sits” on Data Analytics and finally, we could say that the Knowledge Based Economy (KBE) should sit on the bodies of BI that are built inside and outside the Internet. Perhaps it is too early to say it now, but somewhere in between all these, Artificial Intelligence (AI) would come into the picture. As it is now, there are already AI systems that draw their intelligence from their own bodies of BI that they have built, supplementing this with all other bodies of knowledge that are available everywhere, including the Internet itself, and everything else that are connected to it.

For all intents and purposes, the Philippines is now the BPO capital of the world, albeit now mostly in the form of call centers. The signs are however becoming clearer that sooner or later, the demand for call centers or voice services will decline. That does not mean however that the BPO business will disappear, because what will happen next is that the demand will shift towards non-voice services, particularly towards data services or to be more specific, towards data driven services. And even if it could be said that AIs or chat-bots will take over, we could still reasonably expect that the demand for AI programming will go up, along with technical support for non-voice services.

As yet another trend, IOT services could become a significant part of non-voice services, a trend that would eventually be generally classified under the data business. In that sense, it could be said that the data business can become the core of the broader IOT business. By the way, it has been said that the mobile phone is the first real IOT device to emerge in the market. That could not be too far from the truth, because as it already is happening, mobile phones are practically functioning as machines that are talking to other machines, and hence it could be considered already as M2M. As the personal computer (PC) became the classic multipurpose tool before, the mobile phone is coming out with even more purposes than the PC.

Over and over again, it has been said and predicted that content is king, and that will surely happen. In the sense however that content could be considered as the soul of the information and communications technologies, it could also be said that infrastructure is the body, and without the body, the soul would not be of any use. Now that we have the chance to make KBE as real as ever, we should now become more serious in making our connectivity faster and cheaper, because if our connectivity will not improve, our productivity will surely not improve. In the same manner that our food supplies will not grow by itself, we should realize that our bandwidth will not grow by itself.

E-mail: iseneres@yahoo.com