(Franki Chamaki
This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.
Author: Antonio Neri, President and CEO, HPE
- We are generating unprecedented and ever-increasing amounts of data.
- As well as its benefits, this trend is consuming energy and generating waste at unsustainable levels.
- We need a paradigm shift in the way we use, store and analyse data if we are to realise its full potential.
While we have made some progress towards the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we need to work even more effectively together to create and scale approaches that address global inequalities and preserve our planet’s precious resources.
The new digital frontier
Part of being laser-focused on the SDGs means bearing in mind the transformative technologies that now underpin modern civilization and that will help drive solutions to these issues: the new digital frontier. This frontier is based on a single resource – data – and is underpinned by constant connectivity and the disruptive power of computing.
Data generation is exploding, and mainly at the edge; our phones, cars, fridges, factories, medical equipment, fields and satellites are generating unprecedented amounts of data. The promise of the new digital frontier lies in our ability to extract actionable insights from this information.
By leveraging data collected from connected platforms and devices, and by processing it at the edge, organizations can tap into critical insights that can inform quicker decisions – within digital classrooms, health centres or autonomous vehicles, for example – to make our world a better, safer place. Answers to some of society’s most pressing challenges across medicine, climate change, space and more are buried in massive amounts of data, and the convergence of 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), high-performance computing and other emerging technologies is helping to unlock them.
Because of the power inherent in this convergence, we are poised to disrupt how we address social, economic and environmental problems. How do we rethink the way we process, manage, and protect data to improve lives, maximize resources and use less energy without sacrificing security or ethics? How can we ensure data benefits all of society in a way that is equitable and sustainable? I believe the first step is treating data like a natural resource.
Data as a natural resource
Like oil, gas and other natural resources, the extraction of data requires energy. In fact, it already consumes nearly 10% of energy globally. As the digital frontier takes hold, we need to better address how we treat data so that we mitigate the growth of so-called data landfills.
These data landfills occur when we mismanage the explosive demand for data by using too much space, materials and energy to harness and analyze it. We must innovate transformative solutions that will allow businesses to reap the benefits of connectivity in a resource-constrained world in ways that keep data waste to a minimum.
To combat this risk, HPE is investing in research and development to develop new solutions that can compute with a fraction of the energy per calculation, without sacrificing performance. We realized that the current model of IT cannot be applied to a world where literally everything computes. We’re using too much power, space, cooling, human management and cost to efficiently power a digital world.
Data landfills also accumulate when we don’t fully extract value from data before putting it to rest. What I hear from customers across industries, governments and NGOs alike is that they need help unlocking value from all of their data to provide better results for their customers and citizens.
What is the World Economic Forum doing about digital trade?
What is the World Economic Forum doing about digital trade?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution – driven by rapid technological change and digitalization – has already had a profound impact on global trade, economic growth and social progress. Cross-border e-commerce has generated trillions of dollars in economic activity continues to accelerate and the ability of data to move across borders underpins new business models, boosting global GDP by 10% in the last decade alone.
The application of emerging technologies in trade looks to increase efficiency and inclusivity in global trade by enabling more small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to repeat its benefits and by closing the economic gap between developed and developing countries.
However, digital trade barriers including outdated regulations and fragmented governance of emerging technologies could potentially hamper these gains. We are leading the charge to apply 4IR technologies to make international trade more inclusive and efficient, ranging from enabling e-commerce and digital payments to designing norms and trade policies around emerging technologies (‘TradeTech’).
Convergence for good
By understanding and investing in the next digital frontier, by treating data as a natural resource and by harnessing convergence, we have the opportunity to drive progress on some of the world’s most intractable societal challenges. Actually, it’s more than an opportunity; it is an obligation to ensure that we enable technological disruption and transformation while also advancing environmental sustainability, human rights, security and equity across every aspect of our world.
The new digital frontier is here, and technological convergence is already beginning; how we adapt, govern and plan around these paradigm shifts will determine our ability to improve the world for future generations.
Leave a Reply