Problems in Smart Earth

According to a report of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004, from 1980 to 2003, the global economic losses caused by climate-related disasters totaled 1 trillion dollars. In the same period, the related insurance business in emerging markets only covered 4% of the total loss of climate-related disasters. The situation in high-income countries is relatively better, reaching 40%. However, there are still more than $500 billion in losses that are not covered by insurance.

Oil and natural gas: At present, the production of existing oil wells in the world only accounts for 20-30% of the recoverable reserves. The cost of drilling a new well is very high, but in fact, if the productivity of the existing oil well can be appropriately increased, the total increase will also bring huge profits to producers and benefit consumers from lower oil prices. However, this is an information-intensive task, and the amount of data generated by only one oil or gas field is about 1 TB(TB) every day. Using intelligent oilfield technology, oilfield workers can analyze the data of oil production speed, fraction, pressure, acoustics and temperature to optimize the performance of oil pump and oil well productivity; Using historical trend to predict when a well will "produce water"; And manage more wells remotely from a central location.

Danish national e-health portal provides doctors with instant access to patients' health history and records. The new system reduces the related administrative costs to only 65,438+0.3% of the total expenditure (365,438+0% in the United States), and keeps the medical error rate in Denmark at the lowest level in the world (0.2%), and the patient satisfaction rate is 94%, which is the highest level in Europe. In addition, by using supercomputing power to predict the genetic mutation of viruses, it is expected to "see" and prevent diseases and even epidemics before they occur and spread.

The food tracking solution pioneered in northern Europe uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track meat and poultry products from farms to supply chains to supermarket shelves.

At present, local high-precision weather forecast can be carried out within the range of Fiona Fang 1-2 km. These technologies have been commercialized and applied in several urban areas, including new york City, Chicago, Kansas City, Atlanta, Baltimore/Washington and Miami/Fort Lauderdale. Peng, President and CEO of IBM: How did we get here? We should thank the "flat world". The world can be at the same level, not only because of openness, but also because of integration-which means that the global economy and society are becoming an ultra-complex system composed of many complex systems-including how we buy, sell, manufacture and market; How to find and call oil, water, commodities, electronic products and ourselves; And how to deal with nature.

This situation sounds daunting, but it actually contains great hope. Complex and simple chaos are very different. As our world becomes more integrated, once we cross this threshold and become a unified system, we need to know the world in a brand-new way. This is not to say that the future world is "predictable" or under our control, but that the way this world works will gradually become easy for us to understand and be influenced by us, and it will also enable us to better find our place in this world.

In the past, we could foresee that it was possible to understand the working mechanism of the world, but it was actually impossible. Because all the running systems in the world are analog. We tried our best, made a lot of guesses and wasted a lot of time, money and energy. For example, even today, the equipment utilization rate in the data center is only 6- 10%. The situation of personal computers is even worse.

Therefore, if you think that I regard my industry and technology as an exception to the general law of world operation, it is not correct. The client/server model (C/S architecture), which once represented advanced technology, is now silent. The fact is, with the information technology of 15 years ago, you didn't even have a chance to solve the problem I described earlier. It was impossible in 2005, when technology was too expensive, too dependent on hardware connection and low utilization rate, too many scattered parts, too small data center and lack of energy and management-related expertise.

Fortunately, the new technological reality has made great progress possible. The emerging computing model is far more "intelligent" than the previous model: Internet, open standards and a large number of client devices (heterogeneous systems and applications are no longer obstacles); Powerful background system-not only has unprecedented computing speed, but also has advanced analysis, modeling and virtualization functions. The new computing mode is based on a new application mode-the software is componentized, dynamically configured and provided as a network service, rather than hardwired to the server. We can integrate data from many sources and analyze it in new ways-not only revealing new patterns, but also responding to them in industry processes.