How Smart Is the Cloud?

Grazed from The Huffington Post. Author: Marcel Hildalgo.

The fundamental question that pushed Alan Turing, the pioneer of computer science, was can machines do what we can do? Turing was said to have come up with everything that computers do today. His concerns were not whether machines could think but if they had the intellectual capacities equal to a human mind. If he were here now how would he assess the advances in the development of computer technology, especially cloud computing? Would Turing think that machine intelligence has come pretty close to human intelligence? The idea is certainly entertaining. And people like Amy Poehler, in a recent Best Buy commercial, had us all laughing when she spiritedly asked the questions: "Where is the cloud?" and "Are we in the cloud now?" The average person cannot ignore that computers have become smarter in ways that continue to amaze us.

A different question is: are computers becoming independent of the user? In other words, will the virtual machine at some point in time completely control the user or even exempt the user? Perhaps a consoling thought articulated by Turing came when he said that an equation, which cannot be solved by a machine, proves the value for human thinking. But the need for smarter computing has opened a gateway to technology that can sometimes feel like the line between human thinking and machine thinking is remarkably thin…

Understandably, smart computing has been the driving force behind the business world for some time now. The reliance on computer applications, databases and online services have been central to the operations within and beyond the enterprise’s physical space. These are the nuts and bolts of any operation. As a result, companies are not only concerned about the products or services they sell, but how to manage their computing infrastructures adequately. This arduous task keeps business owners up at night, no matter how large or small the establishment. Additionally, these sets of interconnected structural elements are costly…

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