If you can save costs, in business or consumer markets, you can make money.
This is technology’s big opportunity in 2023.
The cloud has already transformed how people interact. It’s now going to transform how machines interact.
Sensors and network software can be applied everywhere. Thanks to falling chip prices this can now be done cheaply. There is labor available to write the software, build the companies, and reap the rewards.
Consider the water system. Why aren’t sensors monitoring the condition of pipes, warning of potential failures, and identifying leaks the moment they occur? Why are water authorities still depending on people finding cracks in the street with water coming out of them on their own?
Or consider our traffic systems. Why are lights still on primitive timers? Why aren’t they adjusting in real time to traffic conditions? They can. Lidar and networked radios can tell software of bottlenecks, which can be fought without having to send out a cop.
Every asset, human or machine, needs to be identified when it’s in a system. Southwest Air should have known where all its people were, as well as its physical assets. We already use technology to monitor the condition of aircraft and schedule maintenance before it’s needed. But the airport is a system just as much as the airplanes in it.
This is doubly true in hospitals. Huge amounts of money can be saved, lives can be saved, if we have better coordination of people and machines, sensors checking conditions, software controlling the process. This is called “orchestration.” It’s not just knowing whether the MRI machine works. It’s knowing that the thing is available and that there’s someone around to work it.
What’s holding us back? A shortage of standards. A refusal by vendors to cooperate.
There are answers for both challenges. Open source is one such answer. Standards bodies are another. Both require a cooperative attitude. A recession concentrates the mind to create such attitudes.
Existing incentives and opportunities can create these efficiencies, just as they did 20 years ago, when the cloud emerged in the aftermath of the dot-bomb. All that was needed was an attitude adjustment, people and companies investing in long term goals instead of short term goals.
Wealth will come from efficiency. Wealth for the creators, but also wealth for customers. Just as the wealth of the cloud let us work from home through the pandemic, break bulk as efficiently online as in a store, and find out anything about anything in an instant, so the coming boom will create benefits you can’t imagine today.
Time to go to work.
