Telecoms infrastructure is everywhere, satellites in the sky, cables under the sea, datacentres in town, masts on our streets, routers in our homes, mobiles in our hands.  As AI becomes embedded across this infrastructure the recurring patterns it carries will be increasingly understood in entirely new ways, from weather to transport systems, to what we watch and what we do in our homes, to how our hearts are beating.

 

The network has always sensed the world, but now it is starting to interpret it. Over the next decade, AI will help to build a ‘world model’, enabling data from digital infrastructure to interpret patterns, insights and meaning. This evolution will inform us as individuals, as managers of information, and it will inform autonomous systems as robots and digital infrastructure increasingly collaborate.  Over the next twenty years, this shift will fundamentally change how society operates, as connected and autonomous robotic systems become evermore sophisticated and an everyday part of the world around us.

 

The Living Network podcast brings together technical and societal observers: Professor Dimitra Simeonidou OBE, Chief Scientific Advisor to the European Commission and Director of the Smart Internet Lab at the University of Bristol; Simon Saunders OBE, a specialist in communication and computing technology; and Paul Wilson, from GroundedThinking.net, Chair of the advisory board for Smart Cities World.