Smart Industry 1/2019

Smart Lifestyle Interview: Marcus Weldon
ing an extension of this Future X vision
to cover different industrial transformations
later this year.
What are the drivers transforming
human existence in the near future?
We are entering an era of being connected
where augmenting human
and machine intelligence will be used
to sense, control, and automate everything.
We believe we are on the verge
of the fourth industrial revolution – a
revolution that will be driven by the
need to automate everything to save
and “create” time. At its heart, this is
a technological revolution driven by
machines and sensors connecting to
augmented intelligence over a massively
scalable, ultra-high-capacity,
ultra-low-latency, dynamic new network
infrastructure, which we call
“The Future X Network.” The net effect
will be a massive increase in productivity
with machines assisting and
augmenting humans in both repetitive
physical tasks and complex intellectual
tasks.
Can you envision some revolutionary
technologies, or even disruptive
innovations, influencing our lives?
I believe that the current consumerdriven
digital platforms will be superseded
by two sets of new value platforms,
focused on augmenting how
people perceive and understand their
world and how to control and automate
it. These platforms will redefine
human existence in the next decades.
Over the past 20 years, web services
have redefined how people shop,
read, consume media, find information,
and interact. But, in reality, these
The next revolution
will be
driven by the
need to automate
everything
to save and
“create” time.
services have just created digital replacements
for existing capabilities,
increasing convenience but not manifestly
changing human existence.
Moreover, service and experience
quality and user privacy have been
sacrificed for the sake of convenience
and the offer of “free” services. This has
resulted in no net increase in quality
of life or productivity and the initial
utility has eroded over time.
The next phase of existence will be
driven by the digitization of all physical
systems (including humans) and
the creation of new machine automations
to assist humans in every
“scale” task. This will result in two new
platform types – platforms that assist
humans with perception of the physical
world, and platforms that assist
humans to control the physical world.
These platforms will couple to existing
digital web platforms created during
Industry 3.0 to create the fundamental
new value set for Industry 4.0. The critical
characteristics of these new cyberphysical
platforms are the ability to
support and connect a massive scale
of low-latency, real-time data streams
from a multitude of sensors, with augmented
cognition systems that assist
humans in creating new understanding
and optimized outcomes.
What is your perspective of the future
of communications and its key
technology elements?
The next industrial revolution will be
driven by the digitization of all physical
systems to create unprecedented
levels of awareness and knowledge.
This will allow the augmentation of
every process and system, increasing
efficiency and productivity – and ultimately
creating time.
The existing network architecture
must radically transform to meet
these needs, due to the massive increase
in capacity and reliability, and
massive decrease in latency, required.
This new Future X network will have
a number of profound architectural
changes, such as moving from a
highly centralized to a massively distributed
network architecture, and
moving from billions of smart devices
to trillions of simple sensors, as well
as new intelligent control algorithms
and systems.
Which development do you see for
the fixed wide area network?
We are at the beginning of a new era of
access networks, as industrial automation
and new infrastructure and information
systems will require capacities
of 1Gbps to 10Gbps and latencies of
one microsecond to 10 microseconds,
with ultra-high reliability and adaptability.
We have exhausted the use
of the traditional low band [