I wouldn't have thought that if I started blogging again, I'd be writing about the cloud for the third time.
What happened was — perhaps because my company is already in the (Google) cloud — I got invited to the "The Cloud made for Hungary" event.

Of course, this was also a "buy our product" type of talk, but perhaps it was a bit more than that too. Buzzwords like Big Data, Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have slowly but surely started to actually make sense and come together into a coherent whole.

This is the direction the world is heading, whether we like it or not.

A few figures from the talks:

  • In Hungary, we spend 49% of our working time on things that could be automated. If we did this, of course the efficiency of our businesses would jump dramatically too.
  • Every industry is moving toward digitalization, so by 2021, medium and large enterprises will be using cloud-based services, partly or fully.
  • By 2022, 90% of all business innovation will essentially be centered around cloud-based services.
  • The currently estimated amount of data in the world is 33 zettabytes. (Two threes and 21 zeros. 33 trillion gigabytes, just for clarity :-) This will quintuple by 2025.

So the essence of the matter is the following:

1. Turn everything into data. When you change location (GPS), pass in front of a camera (imaging), make decisions (what you clicked on), press a key, upload a file, call someone, stop in front of a shop window, or the user orders a pizza. Or when a tree grows and a child is sad. Really, everything. This would be Big Data.

2. Collect and store it. Upload your data to the (Google) cloud, because it's cheap, because you don't need a separate security guard, access control system, server, or power supply; exactly as much capacity as needed is available, and it's practically unlimited; you don't need a separate helpdesk, version updates, and it's already integrated with a bunch of services out of the box. Oh, and you can access it from anywhere, anytime. And all of this is actually true. This would be Google Cloud Platform.

3. Use an application (AutoML, BigQuery) — or write your own — that, based on the unlimited and cheap computing capacity, finds patterns. For example, that the plants in a field are green and how densely they are spaced. This is a pattern. The program then finds the differences; we teach it what these mean, so that later it will be able to recognize the differences itself and produce the result. This would be Artificial Intelligence, and within that, Machine Learning.

4. Finally, we arrive at the brave new world where companies know everything about everything and everyone, and give us what we don't even know we want.

I could cite plenty more examples, but the possibilities are limitless, and they're also readily available.

For me, only one real question remains: how will Hungarian programmers, decision-makers, and entrepreneurs be able to break away from the graph-paper notebook and the Excel spreadsheet?

I would have gladly seen a case study on that too.