Towards Broad Artificial Intelligence (AI) & The Edge in 2021
Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickened its progress in 2021.
A new administration is in place in the US and the talk is about a major push for Green Technology and the need to stimulate next generation infrastructure including AI and 5G to generate economic recovery with David Knight forecasting that 5G has the potential – the potential – to drive GDP growth of 40% or more by 2030. The Biden administration has stated that it will boost spending in emerging technologies that includes AI and 5G to $300Bn over a four year period.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the EU have announced a Green Deal and also need to consider the European AI policy to develop next generation companies that will drive economic growth and employment. It may well be that the EU and US (alongside Canada and other allies) will seek ways to work together on issues such as 5G policy and infrastructure development. The UK will be hosting COP 26 and has also made noises about AI and 5G development.
The world needs to find a way to successfully end the Covid-19 pandemic and in the post pandemic world move into a phase of economic growth with job creation. An opportunity exists for a new era of highly skilled jobs with sustainable economic development built around next generation technologies.
AI and 5G: GDP and jobs growth potential plus scope to reduce GHG emissions (source for numbers PWC / Microsoft, Accenture)
The image above sets out the scope for large reductions in emissions of GHGs whilst allowing for economic growth.
GDP and jobs growth will be very high on the post pandemic agendas of governments around the world. At the same time those economies that truly proposer and grow rapidly in this decade will be those who adopt Industry 4.0 technology and in turn will lead to a shift away from the era of heavy fossil fuel consumption towards a digital world that may be powered by renewable energy and with transportation that is either heavily electric or over time, hydrogen based.
2021 will mark the continued acceleration of Digital Transformation across the economy.
Firms will be increasingly “analytics driven” (it needs to be stressed that analytics rather than data driven is the key term). Data is the fuel that needs to be processed. Analytics provide the ability for organisations to make actionable insights.
The examples of how Machine to Machine Communication at the Edge enabled by AI could work maybe demonstrated by the following image as an example:
In the image above the Machine to Machine communication allows for broadcast across the network that a person has been detected stepping onto the road so that even the car that does not have line of sight of the person is aware of their presence
It is important to note that AI alongside 5G networks will be at the heart of this transition to the world of Industry 4.0.
5G will play an important role as 5G networks are not only substantially faster than 4G networks, but they also enable significant reductions in latency in turn allowing for near real-time analytics and responses, and also enable far greater capacity for connection thereby facilitating massive machine to machine communication for IoT devices on the Edge of the network (closer to where the data is created on the device).
The image below sets out the speed advantage of 5G networks relative to 4G.
However, as noted above 5G has many more advantages over 4G than speed alone as shown in the image below:
The growth in Edge Computing will reduce the amount of data being sent backwards and forwards between a remote cloud server and thereby make the system more efficient.
The economic benefits of 5G are set out below:
Towards AI at the Edge (AIIoT)
To date AI has been most pervasive and effective in the areas of Social Media and Ecommerce giants whose large digital data sets give them an advantage and where edge cases don’t matter so much in terms of their consequences.
