How AI is fundamentally changing the role of the Data Centre
At the end of the 19th century, massive power plants with steam turbines made it, for the first time in history, possible to generate electricity and deliver it over long distances to consumers. The electricity was delivered as a utility thus negating the need for companies having to invest in high capital items to self-generate their own electricity. What followed was the advent of the assembly line and a period of immense economic growth driven by mass production. Similarly, data centres are now becoming the enablers of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the era of Artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and other forms of smart automation.
Data Centres are the ‘engine room’ for this new technology and what many people still don’t realise is that AI is fundamentally changing the role of the data centre, turning them into the centralised power plants for the next industrial revolution.
AI has become a widely discussed topic by experts and mainstream media alike. There continues to be frequent debate on whether the onset of this new technology will be a positive or negative change for humanity. I sit in the optimistic ‘camp’ and believe that AI will allow us to automate many jobs, which will create the need for new jobs thus allowing us to evolve as a species.
“While some jobs may be displaced, many more are likely to be created as real incomes rise and patients still want the ‘human touch’ from doctors, nurses, and other health and social care workers,” says John Hawksworth, the chief economist at PwC. There will also be demand for jobs that did not exist until relatively recently, including machine learning experts, data detectives, AI business development managers, and others.
The jobs that are most likely to be automated and controlled by AI are the ones that can be broken down into a series of concrete steps, and don’t require much creative or social intelligence. They include data entry clerks, accountants, drivers, couriers, administrators, receptionists, telemarketers.
While no one can predict how the future job market will look like, it’s certain that millions of workers worldwide will be affected by automation over the next two decades. A report published last year by McKinsey Global Institute states that up to 375 million workers worldwide could be affected by emerging technologies such as AI and robotics. The OECD, an inter-governmental group of high-income countries, believes that 14 percent of jobs in OECD countries are highly automatable. In the UK, this would account for approximately 5 million jobs being automated (approximately 20 million jobs in the US).
According to a PwC analysis, automation has the potential to bring great economic benefits and contribute up to $15 trillion to global GDP by 2030. It’s also expected to radically reshape the job market, much like all previous industrial revolutions.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM are leading the charge in AI research and building on mass hyper-scale data centres in preparation for the arrival of the ubiquitous use of AI technologies in the job market. They understand that traditional microprocessors are not designed to meet the computational requirements of cutting-edge AI algorithms and are designing their hardware in these data centres to meet with the demands.
Anyone can easily tap into the massive computational power of these cloud-based power plants and embrace the transformative potential of AI, just like anyone could draw electricity from Thomas Edison’s Holborn Viaduct power plant, the world’s first coal-fired public power plant.
I personally believe that ‘data centre’, or ‘data center’ for my US colleagues, is the wrong noun being used for these facilities; centralisd ‘data plants’ seems a more appropriate noun based on the function they provide society with today and into the future.
Comments