::: nBlog :::
We can see evolution, in Darwinian sense, everywhere around us. For tiny bacteria, genetic changes may be seen in weeks, while in mammals like us those can take tens of thousands of years.
Natural selection is very pragmatic and utilizes tangible resources and available capabilities to ensure the survival of the fittest. Genes are selfish, as put by Richard Dawkins, ushering their carriers to replicate them as efficiently as possible.
Biological analogues are common in technology. At BaseN, I often point out how our BaseN Platform operates in an ‘organic’ way, meaning that resources like CPU power and storage can be added and removed on the fly, even without service interruptions.
Communication bandwidth between living organisms has always been severely limited by distance, language and visual processing. This has driven mother nature to develop predominantly local memory and processing (brain) for higher life forms.
When people develop new smart technologies in form of e.g. Internet of Things, there’s a strong tendency to mimic nature and spread small computers or at least logic controllers next to physical things. Nature does it, so it must be good? Perhaps not.
Adhering to our spime concept, we at BaseN believe that memory, processing and visualization must happen in the most efficient location, since today’s technology has given us unprecedented communications capacity across the globe and beyond. When this is taken into account already in the design phase, totally new kinds of applications and opportunities become evident. Of course, that ‘location’ must be scalable, fault tolerant, secure and inherently distributed – and geared towards applications of the real world, not just for entertainment and fashion gadgets.
This paradigm shift is a formidable challenge to the current engineering community, but I believe it to be quite rapid as more and more Spime-driven products and services become available, with continuously evolving capabilities not reachable the traditional way.
//Pasi
