At this moment in our time we are using data as consumers daily, for hours of the day. This is data that is created by content creators, producers, and creatives. In the future that data is going to be more saturated, and not just because of the rise of the content creator markets, but because it is going to include much more than creativity.
The data that we consume, like this blog post you are viewing right now, is all on the internet. Everything we create as a species, gets cataloged and put on the web.
The problem is the inferior infrastructure that the internet is based upon. Lets just ignore the crumbling physical highway, fiber, and transportation infrastructure at the moment. Simply focusing on the data structure. You have your computer/phone/tablet, connects to your modem/router, then to a spot generally down the street from you, that then sends you to a service center server, which then transports you to another center, and so forth until you get to that website's server. Nowadays most websites are being hosted on the same places, Bluehost, Godaddy, Wordpress, Wix, etc.
That at least keeps the data in one area, so it is a little more organized than just people all over the place hosting their own websites on their own server.
There is a change in our future, and this change is going to be something that will ripple across the world. Jack Ma describes the the technology aspect brilliantly. Though we at the U.L.C. know that there is much more factors involved than just tech, government, and jobs. There is a philosophical and economical correlation that needs to be addressed at the same time as we address the technology revolution. It will impede our progress if we don't, and despite Jack not really mentioning it in the interview it seems he knows that too.
Let us talk about our situation now then, we have these little pods, or hubs, of internet, and our data is travelling between them. As we start to create more and more, and AI starts to collect more and more, we will have too much to deal with. We won't at first know what to do with it all, and not only that our current systems will not be able to hold, let alone process everything. This is where quantum computers will be extremely helpful in our advancement when they are started to work.
Our structure is a ticking time bomb if you think about it, and although it has only gotten more advanced, our way of thinking about the internet has stayed the same. We evolved from blogs, to podcasts, to video, and eventually Virtual Reality content. The thing is that is just the TYPE of data, and not the form of data and process of it. There are so many hours of video on YouTube at this point that even if you spend your entire life 24 hours a day, all year, just watching videos you will never watch them all. Even if you filter out repeats, unnecessary, and boring stuff.
Our Future is an Internet like a Forest
If our internet now is like a tree, then our future must become like a forest. It is a simple metaphor to put in perspective the large scale of the web. We use metaphors like this in Astronomy and physics all the time. Why wouldn't we for things like the internet, and world wide communication. There are projected to be 9 Billion people in our near future, and at the current point of our 7 Billion we have now only about half are on the internet. That means every single thing you have ever seen on the web was created by only half of the world's population. Eventually access to internet will be on the same level of severity as food and water.
This means all of the parts of the world who are in poverty, and can't even get food and water, will be getting internet when they get their resources. When those countries start to develop more, then their citizens will go on the internet too. This is a great thing, but the repercussions of that is that we are going to have to deal with the same level of immaturity the internet has caused, for just a little bit longer. We are starting to grow out of that stage in our "Internet Life", we are becoming the young adults of the internet age. Though when all of those brand new users start to get on we will revert back at least to our late teenage years, if not pre-teen years. More than likely not for long, but it is a point to make. More over there will be double as many content creators as there is now, and when we hit 9B then pretty much all of them will be on the internet.
Our resources, infrastructure, and systems are heavily strained now, wait until that happens. This is why we must change our structure of our data tree. Either we need to go from a cherry tree to oak tree in stature, or we need to just simply add more trees to the forest. Creating new networks for the world to travel and create into.
Changing the way we approach our current situation, and more importantly the future situation.