Bright and very connected future

Disclaimer: Currently I am employed by Microsoft, but my views and thoughts are still my own. The reason I joined Microsoft was, the work Microsoft have been doing for last couple of years in Open Source Space. Today I am a advocate for Open Source representing Microsoft.

You know the feeling when you have a EUREKA! moment, when you just realize something that you have always known, just never thought of it in the relevant context. Well I had such moment when I was watching a video on the YouTube. The video was about what the 6G could be, and why (even though 4G might be enough) 5G will not cut it in the future. One of the examples was how every car on the road will need to be connected.

Why connected, well in the future, at some point, all (99%+) the cars will be self-driving. It will not matter if you are in city or out in the middle of nowhere, you will need to have power to calculate everything that the car need in order to take from point A to point B safely. The car will need to have those calculations instantaneously. Then it hit me, why the self-driving tech is possible to be in a production vehicle today. Tesla has managed to launch several mass-produced models of their cars, that are accessible to an average(ish) consumer. These cars do not need to carry all the compute power they need. In the past, if you wanted to have an autonomous vehicle, you had to have several of big biffy servers installed in the cars. Yes, I am talking about those servers you have in a data center.

I remember, like 10 years ago, I was watching a documentary on Discovery. The had a big SUV with something like 4 1U units. Just think about the extra weight. The EUREKA! I had was, the reason cars do not need to have these big servers anymore is, and they need to be connected is, they are connected to the cloud. Because of the advancements in cloud technology, and IoT alongside, you can now have access to (almost) unlimited compute power, in matter of seconds. You do not even need to have to invest upfront for the hardware, you just pay for what you really need. That is the beauty of Cloud and IoT. IoT and Cloud makes it possible for a simple, low power device to have unlimited compute power, as long as it can be connected to the said cloud.
And then you throw in mesh-networking into the mix...