Page 148 - Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

134 Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

Suppose the injury requires a longer-lasting recuperation period.
We can imagine that short-term disability insurance will be activated
automatically. However, what sort of response should an employer auto-
mate? An employer could automatically reassign others to cover the
duties of the injured colleague or they could automatically hire a tempo-
rary employee. If the disability is judged to be longer lasting or perma-
nent, would the employee be automatically terminated? Would some
system automatically find the ex-employee a new job, based on skills
and disability? What if the new job pays less? Would some system auto-
matically sell the house and purchase a cheaper one? All of this automa-
tion can be seen as useful. However, at what point are we just along for
the ride?

7.7 DEPTH OF WSE
We argued that the WSE will consist of many applications generating and
processing data; applications that will interact with each other to produce
an unseen level of automation.
Some people have expressed concern about designing applications
for trillions of devices (Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, 2015). We submit that
based on our analysis this problem may be quite manageable. In particular
it is unlikely that any application will directly interact with three trillion
devices. Based on our theory, the WSE will be compartmentalized so that
many applications will process fairly local data. If we look at the dependen-
cies of the models from our extended example about a person’s health, we
see a fairly low depth, where depth is measured by the number of applica-
tions that depend on crucial data from those applications that report
to them.
Consider Fig. 7.4, in which we portray this scenario. It should be noted
that we only included a small subset of the applications that were mentioned
in the health scenario. The figure suggests that the complexity of the WSE,
as judged by the depth of it, might grow approximately in a logarithmic fash-
ion in relationship to the number of linked IoT devices. To be clear, while
we believe that there will be an exponential growth in the number of appli-
cations, we think that the WSE will be wide rather than deep, with depth as
defined above and where width is measured by applications that loosely
depend on data from other applications.