NGI KEYNOTE @ WORLD IOT EXPO 2018

IoT, NG and pragmatic cybernetics

Internet of Things Expo, Huihaiwan Intelligent Sensing Forum
Wuxi Xinhu Pullman

The main focus of the talk is in three areas: infrastructure, services and entitlements.

Infrastructure needs to be balanced between capabilities in the Cloud (data-lakes and AI) and edge (5G), between intricate and complex semi-autonomous to autonomous self-healing systems and local repairability to ensure urban resilience. This requires attention on two very different but equally important skilling strategies.

Infrastructure support services.

A service is any operation that supports either machines or people in their wellbeing and abilities to build a meaningful and cooperative existence. This thus entails the entire trajectory from BAN- to VWAN; BAN (body, wearables), LAN (home, smart services to the home), WAN (mobility in general from bike to connected car and plane), and VWAN (the very wide area network; the smart city).

Blockchain as well as connectivity itself have become commodities and are thus services in this view. Services support everyday activities. Entitlements are new entities as synchronous and fixed identities cannot support services in a hybrid infrastructure. A balance between anonymity (in federated sets of identities that are tied to services such as shopping, dating, recovering from illness….) and accountability (in stable sets of relationships of behavior and activity) for processes, machines, products and people in wallets, is vital to create popular support from all generations for a new type of governance.

Entitlements support services.

Extelligence, a term by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, a biologist and mathematician, is “the cultural capital that is available to us in the form of external media (e.g. tribal legends, folklore, nursery rhymes, books, videotapes, CD-ROMs, etc.)” In an information-rich, digitally connected world, where much of the knowledge and tools that we make use of are outside our heads there will be a need to develop new communication ‘senses’ that allow us to manage and make use of the enormous amount of information we will be confronted by. This will lead to the development and adoption of new and different types of human-computer interfaces and different ways of communicating with technology. We know this as deep learning and machine learning; artificial intelligence.

But this is the superficial reading of extelligence. Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, “regard the ‘complicity’ of extelligence and intelligence as fundamental to the development of consciousness in evolutionary terms for both the species and the individual. ‘Complicity’ is a combination of complexity and simplicity, and Cohen and Stewart use it to express the interdependent relationship between knowledge-inside-one’s-head and knowledge-outside-one’s-head that can be readily accessed.” (idem)

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