The Whole World is Now a Computer, Says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (zdnet.com)

Thanks to cloud computing, the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, we should start to think of the planet as one giant computer, according to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. From a report: "Digital technology, pervasively, is getting embedded in every place: every thing, every person, every walk of life is being fundamentally shaped by digital technology -- it is happening in our homes, our work, our places of entertainment," said Nadella speaking in London. "It's amazing to think of a world as a computer. I think that's the right metaphor for us as we go forward."

[...] AI is core to Microsoft's strategy, Nadella said: "AI is the run time which is going to shape all of what we do going forward in terms of applications as well as the platform." Microsoft is rethinking its core products by using AI to connect them together, he said, giving an example of a meeting using translation, transcription, Microsoft's HoloLens and other devices to improve decision-making. "The idea that you can now use all of the computing power that is around you -- this notion of the world as a computer -- completely changes how you conduct a meeting and fundamentally what presence means for a meeting," he said.

Comments

The World is NOT a Computer

[techmage]

The world may have a massive collection of computers. Huge sums of those machines are in cloud computing. But they are all separate. When all of them are connected and act as one, having access to everything all at once, then we will have a world computer. That moment is not now.

Capitalism

[bluefoxlucid]

I've frequently suggested regulating economies and creating public services to use the market as a computer.

In healthcare, for example, the US can provide a public option that guarantees everyone healthcare at all times. When they can get affordable care, we can put a payroll tax on their employer (and an additional income tax on their paycheck) for either the affordable rate or (if less) the amount they usually pay, thus ensuring neither gets a monetary benefit by selecting the public option over the employer's plan (selection of healthcare is 100% based on perceived quality of service).

Medicare tries to calculate a local market rate for a service. That results in many things, such as providers who can provide the service at lower cost billing in-line with other providers in the area, thus making wide profit margins from the government.

Our regulators have petabyte databases of remittance rates negotiated between every insurer and provider for every service. They're hooked up to powerful mainframes that can process the whole of this data in short hours. It's ridiculous.

So at each individual (service,provider) tuple, we can compute the normal distribution of remittance rates, and then select two standard deviations down. That's our negotiation cap. The Federal Public Option--Medicare Part E--negotiates rates at individual providers already; instead of using the market rate, Medicare would use the low-end remittance rate.

Somewhere, an insurer has negotiated a pretty good rate. The others might be getting robbed, but that doesn't matter. We are, at all times, for all services, nearly the ideal insurer.

This obviously requires some consideration. Sometimes, the insurer paying less also gets less service--sorting that out takes a lot of time; or we just make that practice illegal. We'll have to tweak the regulations to fit around the obvious outcome of providers creating slightly-different, substantially-similar packages for each insurer, and further when we see what the providers actually do about all this when we tell them they're not allowed to screw around like that.

Still. Wetware computer. No sinking tons of taxpayer resources into trying to win an information arms race against the market of suppliers, providers, and hospitals.

There are other things we need. An investigation into why our healthcare costs so much (I've looked at every explanation given and we might be able to squeeze it down to maybe 15% of GDP while still getting less service than Germany at 11% GDP--something is broken, and e don't know what). Publish local market standards of fairness so the private insurers getting the worst deals can argue their rates down. Make all insurers and hospitals operate as not-for-profit.

Universal healthcare is easy. Going from "universal healthcare" to "low-cost, high-performance universal healthcare" is going to take some work and the integrity to stick with it when it gets hard.