Evolving toward a programmable world

Already billions of processors are embedded in our smartphones, cars, appliances, buildings and the environment. These sensors can send out streams of data about their surroundings, and more and more it is anonymously transmitted to remote data centres - the "clouds" of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple.

From these vast clouds, the companies can power apps that are "spatially aware." To illustrate, Google Maps now draws on data in the cloud to sample the location and movement of cellphones in cars, producing a real-time picture of traffic congestion.

Such computational power, colocated with the gigantic storage that holds the data from all the incoming data streams, will enable faster-than-real-time simulations of many aspects of our physical world. As Mike Liebhold and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future have discussed, computing will have evolved from merely sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. In this evolution, the world by degree becomes programmable.

The California Institute for Telecommunications

At the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Innovation, we are using this vision to better understand the coming digital transformation of health, energy, environment and culture. We are experimenting with sensors to monitor electricity use in homes, buildings and data centres; the data can at the time be analyzed and used to control lighting, heating, cooling, appliances and computers to make them more energy-efficient.

Conceivably, the coupling of the sensor and human streams with planetary computing power will make it possible to create "social forecasts." For good or evil, it seems inevitable that individuals, corporations, political leaders and intelligence agencies will come to use planetary computer models of social behaviour to inject content into the global attention stream at just the right moment, hoping to steer the social dynamics to a desired outcome.