The frameworks that formal architectures supply both enable and constrain certain types of design decisions and desired system qualities. Just like laws and cultural conventions, they embody the values and belief systems of people even though it may not always be obvious to the casual user or even to the original architects themselves.
Today the world is in the midst of laying down a communication and decision fabric that will connect trillions of people, objects, and intelligent machines into the most complex cyber-physical system that the world has ever imagined. The emerging Industrial Internet will connect systems that our lives depend on such as power systems, transportation systems, and healthcare networks.
It has been proposed that globalization has made the world "flat," but is the next generation of network and business architectures now destined to make the world "shallow"? Lost in a seemingly endless fog of distractions and short-term weak connections, will the urge to be connected overwhelm our ability to remain cognitive and free individuals? Has "The Medium" changed the message again without our having knowingly approved? As machines increasingly evolve with stronger forms of artificial intelligence and cognitive computing, they will become more human-like. More importantly as we become a collection of networked beings, will we become more machine-like, twitching and tweeting an endless stream of bits, or will we achieve a higher level of awareness and sophistication? What is our destiny?
Clearly it is a matter of architecture. The systems of systems we are building now will alter how we later process critical information, choose to innovate, and interact with man and machine in the future. In this talk, I will examine the formation of the Industrial Internet Consortium and the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute with this in mind and compare them with respect to their stakeholders, business models, and emerging architectures.
