Smart devices, a cohesive system, a brighter future

If you need a reason to feel good about the direction technology is going, look up Dell Technologies CTO John Roese on Twitter. The handle he composed back in 2006 is @theICToptimist. ICT stands for information and communication. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not produced by MIT Technology Review's editorial staff. "The reason for that acronym was because I firmly believed that the future was not about information technology and communication technology independently," says Roese, president and chief technology officer of products and operations at Dell Technologies. "It was about them coming together." Close to two decades later, it's hard not to call him right. Organizations are looking to the massive amounts of data they're collecting and generating to become fully digital, they're using the cloud to process and store all that data, and they're turning to new wireless technologies like 5G to power data-hungry applications such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. In this episode of Business Lab, Roese walks through this confluence of technologies and its future outcomes. For example, autonomous vehicles are developing fast, but fully driverless cars aren't plying are streets yet. And they won't until they tap into a "collaborative compute model"--smart devices that plug into a combination of cloud and edge-computing infrastructure to provide "effectively infinite compute." "One of the biggest problems isn't making the device smart; it's making the device smart and efficient in a scalable system," Roese says. So big things are ahead, but technology today is making huge strides, Roese says. He talks about machine intelligence, which taps AI and machine learning to mimic human intelligence and tackle complex problems, such as speeding up supply chains, or in health care, more accurately detecting tumors or types of cancer.