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from the video description:

Video fea­tur­ing from IBM: Mike Wing, Andy Stanford-Clark and John Tolva.

Over the past cen­tury but accel­er­at­ing over the past cou­ple of decades, we have seen the emer­gence of a kind of global data field. The planet itself — nat­ural sys­tems, human sys­tems, phys­i­cal objects — have always gen­er­ated an enor­mous amount of data, but we didn’t used to be able to hear it, to see it, to cap­ture it. Now we can because all of this stuff is now instru­mented. And its all inter­con­nected, so now we can actu­ally have access to it. So, in effect, the planet has grown a cen­tral ner­vous system.

Look at that com­plex set of rela­tion­ships among all of these com­plex sys­tems. If we can actu­ally begin to see the pat­terns in the data, then we have a much bet­ter chance of get­ting our arms around this. That’s where soci­eties become more effi­cient, that’s where more inno­va­tion is sparked.

When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimen­sions. One is to be more effi­cient, be less destruc­tive, to con­nect dif­fer­ent aspects of life which do affect each other in more con­science and delib­er­ate and intel­li­gent ways. But the other is also to gen­er­ate fun­da­men­tally new insights, new activ­ity, new forms of social rela­tions. So you could look at the planet as an infor­ma­tion, cre­ation and trans­mis­sion sys­tem, and the uni­verse was hear­ing its infor­ma­tion but we weren’t. But increas­ingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actu­ally begin to hear the planet talk­ing to us.

Music by Lee Feld­man: http://www.leefeldman.com/