> In the talk, he says that the reason we need to do the compute "on the edge" is because the latency between the cloud is insufficient for real-time devices. So what happens when network speeds improve again (better fibre infrastructure, LiFi, etc.)? Will we bring the compute back in to centralized data centres? Will we continue to bounce back and forwards forever, as network and hardware technology leapfrog each other? Is one model better than the other?
Well, for one thing, a lot of the examples such as self-driving cars, drones, and any wearable clearly don't allow for use of fiber. Lifi may have some use cases, but again I don't see how Lifi could help something like a drone or self-driving car.
But another point is availability. Wireless connections can drop in and out and our vulnerable to being slowed down by increased demand. Not to mention that the centralized service itself may fail, due to catastrophic power failure, DOS attacks, or any number of other reasons.
If that centralized service or choppy wireless connection is providing you with your todo-list or family photo album, its probably not a big deal to have occasional outages. If the system is making decisions for self-driving vehicles, that will be an unmitigated disaster.
Even if it is only enough logic to help an unconnected car pull over to the side of the road, a self-driving car needs to be able to operate offline, so one way or another, these cards will need powerful computers inside.
And of course, distributed nodes can also fail. A single car's computer may fail, and that's not good. But the AI of every car in an entire area failing simultaneously because power to the local radio tower goes out is going to be way worse.
The other thing, is that as we have with processing speeds, we will eventually hit limits in bandwidth. Using bandwidth efficiently will become a larger priority (as scarcity increases, so will the cost) and the centralized model clearly has a drawback in terms of bandwidth usage.
So, all in all, I don't think it's just a pendulum that swings back in forth forever, but that the future will be a hybrid, but heavily distributed world out of necessity.