[발췌] Distributed Technologies

출처: Think Academy, "Distributed Technologies," in Complexity Academy, April 15, 2015.


※ 발췌 (excerpt):

Distributed technologies are systems of technology composed of many small parts without centralized coordination or control. Key features to distributed systems include the fact that they are typically user-generated, informal networks, involving non-professional producers, with no one really in control of the entire network system. Examples of this would include peer-to-peer file sharing networks on the internet, mesh cellular telephone networks, or swarm robotic systems.


Distributive World

Our traditional industrial systems of technology are based upon a centralized model design to leverage economies of scale through batch processing, as centrally controlled systems like power generators plants, factories and broadcast media produced technologies and services that were pushed out to end users. Although distributed technologies have always been there on fringes, today a number of factors are working to fundamentally change this centralized model to a more distributed one, where capabilities and production can also take place at the edges of the network by many different actors.

Factors enabling this include:

• Firstly, the emergence of alternative technologies like solar cells, wind turbines and 3D printers as increasingly efficient enough to complete and become mainstream products; 
• Secondly, information technology that allows end-users to set up their own networks of coordination and collaboration at very low costs; 
• And lastly, the deregulation and privatization of many previously state-owned monopoly infrastructure industries that is taking place around the world, as previously vertically integrated national systems are being unbundled allowing for a multiplicity of private actors to enter the value chain, as producers, traders, brokers, retailers and many more actors in a complex ecosystem.

Examples

A good example of shift from centralized to distributed mobile telephony. If we look at the emerging infrastructures in rural Africa or Asia today, they often bypass the centralized copper telephone network altogether instead implementing a decentralized cellular network. This helps to demonstrate how distributed technologies thrive particularly in areas with low population that lack the critical mass required for traditional centralized batch processing systems, and also where there is a lack of formal administration and pre-existing incubates. The emergence of renewable smart grids is another example of this. Information systems and distributed technologies are working to fundamentally re-architect the network away from the centrally controlled and operated traditional power grids that delivered electricity to end-users towards a distributed architecture where end-users are central as both consumers and producers, and also as managers of the systems through smart devices and information about prices and consumption.

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User-Generated

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Informal

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De-Professionalization

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Distributed Control

Lastly, no one is really in control of these distributed systems. The centralized infrastructure systems of the nation state were centrally controlled and managed in a hierarchical fashion. The privatization of infrastructure like water, road and rail networks added many more actors to this, as they became managed through market mechanisms. But with true distributed technologies, management of the system may become fully distributed out to the local level of the end-user. In some circumstances, clear ownership may not even apply. Fully distributed technologies are also managed in a distributed self-organizing fashion. Mesh networks and peer-to-peer file sharing are examples of this. Every user supports the provision of the network service. They have a swarm-like dynamic. Control of the system’s behavior and functionality is in the hands of many.

Inverse Infrastructure

Distributed technologies are also called inverse infrastructure as they have an almost inverse effect on the make-up to our infrastructure to that of the industrial model.2 If you have spent any time in the technology industries, you would have heard the word ‘disruptive’ repeatedly, and it is this structural transformation that is a large part of where this disruption is coming from. Because these alternative technologies simply do not fit into our pre-existing model, and they are not about to simply go away, something has to give. The whole landscape has to change, and that is a scale of disruption that we have not had for a number of centuries; since the Industrial Revolution.

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