In the film Avatar, I was especially interested in the ability to link to other beings or transfer ourselves from one body to another. If we believe inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, we will soon be able to do these transhuman activities ourselves. The Singularity is a theory that computer intelligence will surpass human intelligence, resulting in a highly accelerated rate of technological progress. In The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil writes about our future ability to digitize and upload our minds to new types of bodies, and even to live forever, since our minds would exist digitally outside of any specific body (and assuming you have several good backups). Here is a video in which he explains these concepts. A movie, The Singularity is Near, will be released this year. There is even a Singularity University, co-founded by Kurzweil and personal spaceflight pioneer Peter Diamandis, in partnership with Google, ePlanet Ventures, and Autodesk.
Imagine, rather than venturing to a rainforest for an Avatar-like vacation, just renting a body (a cyborg) there, and downloading yourself to it! You could also tap directly in to the experience of someone in a rainforest, with his or her permission. If your cyborg were harmed or destroyed, you would be backed up elsewhere and could resume from there.
If you’re concerned about any of the issues surrounding The Singularity, you have time: according to Kurzweil, The Singularity won’t occur until 2045, although mind uploading will be possible in the 2030s. If you’re really concerned about whether The Singularity is here yet or not, visit www.isthesingularityhereyet.com.
In addition to transhumanism, Avatar is about revolution. According to Bernard Golden, CEO of HyperStratus and a columnist for CIO magazine, cloud computing will cause three revolutions. He masterfully wrote an epic three-part article series describing each cloud revolution in detail:
- Part One: Prologue and “Revolution #1: The Change in IT Operations.” Winners: Apps groups, Apps groups (2); Losers: IT operations; Winners: IT operations
- Part Two: “pay-as-you-go” pricing; opex vs. capex; control shift from IT to business units; low cost fosters experimentation; scaled cost encourages large-scale applications
- Part Three: Epilogue; price elasticity means apps explode; apps explosion puts unprecedented pressure on IT infrastructure; app developer shortages, with emphasis on locating talent and leveraging service providers
Here is Golden’s conclusion: “I’m sure it’s easy to dismiss these three revolutionary developments of cloud computing as over-dramatic. However, as a species, we humans have very little temporal perspective. In 1995, who would have predicted the rise of a computing giant like Google? Computing at that time was underpowered PCs communicating to servers that looked like slightly beefy desktop computers upended onto their sides. Rack servers didn’t even exist. We don’t do a very good job of extrapolating current trends into the future, but it’s clear that cloud computing is a trend that will overturn the practices and assumptions used in IT today. It’s going to be a wild ride.”
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| Ocelot, Amazon Rainforest, Ecuador |
I highly recommend reading Golden’s articles about the cloud-computing revolution, because they provide an excellent overview of the changes in computing that we are seeing now and will see over the next few years. Over time, cloud computing may partially pave the way to the transhuman activities we see in Avatar and to what will be the greatest revolution of all (if it occurs): The Singularity.
Avatar won Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, Best Cinematography, and Best Art Direction. It was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Sound Editing. As we’ve probably all heard, it is the highest grossing film of all time. How long will that record last?
If you want to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud in the here and now, consider these cloud stars that are best in their class:
- Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
- SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
- Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
- Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
- Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
- Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
- Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
- Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.
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