Improving Information and Communication Technology to Innovate the Paradigms of World Progress - Part 1-

The paper approaches the premises of evaluating “right tracks of development†and innovate the progress, in the actual dynamic World context, facing unprecedented levels of concern or danger for Earth and humankind evolution, considering that the information and communication technology (ICT) became the main driving factor of the human society by the complex consequences of its services, products and applications, when supporting the Information Society (IS) on the way towards the Knowledge Based Society (KBS) and that the average development is the result of global tendencies/innovations, including knowledge refining. We approached the ICT role in this connected World and considered Maslow pyramid as reflecting the essential needs of humankind, and this way it resulted that the energy is among the primary needs of progress and the research in this domain is perhaps the most important, but also difficult, as World is facing at least 3 combined sources of crises, including global warming (climate changes), Earth resources fading and consumption. As an average dependence, the global warming was (and is) mostly influenced by the way we generate and use the energy for the global processes, resulting that the luck of having on Earth plenty of fossil resources for World amazing industry progress, including the exponential pace given by ICT, is now the main factor (from the above 3), we have to reconsider/mitigate. As a starting point, when analyzing the actual Earth ecosystem and its premises of development, we used some relevant examples. In the case of Thorium nuclear energy, we considered the role of ICT to leverage the data extraction from uranium experience/processes and the necessary knowledge refining for thorium use. At Blockchain, one of the advanced ICT applications, as it is severely complicated/limited by energy factors, we pointed the benefits of hash-puzzle solving power metric. The basics of ICT industry, first including telecommunications and computers, should also be radically improved to meet the high requirements of carbon-aware, but, eventually, among the most important challenges for ICT context development, along with direct energy consumption (power), we could include the complex relations between performances (capacity, speed, memory and so on) and power, the extension of the 5G(6G) networks, IoT or energy costs increase. Analyzing the impact of energy on data centers [4], we observed that all the prior expertise is used to optimize the relation performance/power or memory/time, but actually it is necessary to rethink the models, for both device and network scale, including carbon-aware software engineering. The difficulty of finding solutions for the actual crises lies also on the high/apogee levels of performances and progress we are in. This way we have to agree that the old improvement solutions have already reached their maximal potential benefits and new computing paradigms are necessary, based on some holistic principles, for all the ecosystem (including education and further knowledge refining). More than only improving ICT software, the business processes could benefit in efficiency and efficacy by improving the thinking of organization/processes strategies and data tools, still involving ICT, but with updated approaches of using resources, including humans and technology. The practical consequences of such changes of paradigm will provide a higher flexibility in development and a faster updating the business to the emergent World challenges, targeting the new progress solutions. Such modern approaches of business processes could use the concept of data products, as detailed in [5]. This approach also reflects the increasing value of using data/information in the Data Deluge era, with the green ICT trend, which eventually also provides an optimal development/use of ICT instruments. Our conclusion is that we have to treat data products with special attention, as a new type of product, but with features and impact on industry and beyond, as they are linked, in more and more complex ways, with the advanced ICT products, systems and services, at Earth scale. As a consequence, we would propose that data products and similar new concept provided by ICT for IS toward KBS to be used like other sensible products (food, vegetables and so on), considering the appropriate environmental variable conditions, but in this case the known “time sensitivity†has to determine a more large/complex family of consequences/measures, because of the fast changes ICT and IS/KBS generate under the processes of knowledge refining we already mentioned in [11][17][13][19]. As a final conclusion, we have just observed some subtle ways the ICT could leverage the World progress by innovating its tools, but not in the same fast and sophisticated ways, as they have to find simpler and more business-oriented solutions/tools/advances. There is no doubt that these partial approaches, versus the complexity of World changes and uncertainty require further and continuously analyses to be done, at Earth scale and with appropriate knowledge refining.