The edge man and fata morgana

What is Edge?

In a blog last week , I wondered whether #EdgeComputing is not simply a component of the digital transformation rather than a thing by itself.

One of  the world most respected authority in multi access edge computing is Alex Reznik, Chair of MEC ISG at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI),

Here a quote from his article What is Edge

Recently, one of the ETSI staff folks pinged me an e-mail that said, “Someone asked me ‘What is Edge’ and I could not quite reply. Can you help?” Well, come on! The answer is simple. 

Edge is… and this is where I got stuck. Really, the answer depends… well… on who you ask and when or where you ask them. 

Multi Access Edge Computing. Clear, but not clear enough

If Alex Reznik got stuck is a sign of vision and intelligence. We can not go on to build universal platforms for something that does not exist - a unique edge computing need satisfied by one implementation. Reznik concludes

 This brings me back full circle. What is “Edge?” The best that I can do is this: it’s anything that’s not a “data center cloud”. Think of any workload you have to support. Clearly, the most cost-effective location to do compute is as deep in your network as possible – this is your “data center cloud”. However, some of your workloads simply cannot be supported there   

What is the Edge Man?

The Urban Dictionary defines the edge man as

a random "next man" who resides away from the central social or cultural area. a peripheral figure who knows not what is going down...

"so did he feel your beat"?

"nah, he's some edge man who dont know the shiznit"

Shiznit is something really cool.

If cool means the civilized world inside a data center, the edge man is in the middle of nothing.

Another buzz word is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Many see the AI as a buttons we press to do the thinking and bring us satisfaction without any efforts from us. 

The female G-spot was first identified by German researcher Ernst Gräfenberg in the 1940s. Touching the G-Spot automatically creates intense orgasms.  No need of brain participation.

 Yuval Noah Harari 

Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (p. 69). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans.

For every dollar and every minute we invest in improving artificial intelligence, it would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in advancing human consciousness. Unfortunately, at present we are not doing much in the way of research into human consciousness and ways to develop it.

We are not doing that. Instead we  rush to arrive to an illusion: a fata morgana mirage that does not exist

edge computing as a trivialized perception of Fata Morgana

In this, humans are similar to other domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful.

We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximize the human potential.

Many corporations, startups,  made this type of humans part of the corporate culture. Human consciousness is suppressed even in most gifted employees. They are "domesticated" yes people, prohibited to say that the emperor has no clothes.

There is no way to monetize solutions in edge computing with one platform only.  Alex Reznik says:

This does beg the question – why are there so many options? After all, it does seem like Amazon and Microsoft are making do with just two. Both Amazon and Microsoft exist in the “over-the-top” world, in which there are only two entities: the cloud; and the customer’s premises.

The rest is just a pipe. But as we know, that “pipe” is actually a highly sophisticated global engineered system (perhaps the most sophisticated such system created by mankind) in which multiple highly sophisticated components are used to ensure that both the critical communication and a request for a youtube video receive the expected QoS. Moreover, it is a massively distributed infrastructure – perhaps the only distributed infrastructure of that scale in the world. Hence it is “edge-native” – perhaps as much as 90% of Telco systems is edge. As these components are virtualized and migrated to a generic compute platform, each becomes a cloud point-of-presence. And so, voila, we have so many options. 

OK, fine…, but do we really need them? Depends on what you mean by “we.” If you mean any single telco operator, chances are the answer is no. Each operator is likely to pick a few Edge Cloud “locales,” – perhaps as few as one.