Yes. You do not do hard real time over the public Internet.
(I've actually had the experience of driving a full-sized vehicle over WiFi. When we built our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2004, we had the test capability of driving it remotely over WiFi, from a control station with a game steering wheel and pedals. Worked fine technically, difficult to drive. 100ms of no signal and the stall timer slammed on the brakes. Self-driving in the "cloud" is not where you want to go.)
Maybe borrow from physics to call it the Egress Horizon.
I can guess what you intended but would be interested in the specifics.
It's a cool phrase though so we should definitely use it
In this case, I think of the network is the computer. It's been for a while, but not yet completely, but it's becoming even more so as time passes.
Not only is the network essentially imbricated with/in the market, but recognizing the market in the role of the computation also means recognizing the roles of all of the different functional components, not just the mechanical/computational "atoms". Basically, I think that thinking this way lets us treat supply-demand basically as a messaging layer.
You can't abstract out supply and demand, at least, not forever. Abstraction is something you do to things so that you don't have to cognitively deal with them, they're predictable.
Humans will act predictably for as long as it makes sense for them to do so. Your business model will eventually fail because nobody will want your product / service anymore. Or they won't want exactly how you're delivering it. Or they'll have decided that X company is more reliable.
Someone has to keep on top of what the people supplying the business with life-sustaining revenue actually want. It can't ever be a machine, unless those machines actually become sentient, which is a completely different discussion. The person can use machines, but they can't actually be a machine.
People spend money, not algorithms. People may delegate to algorithms, but it's always a person in the end.
> Abstraction is something you do to things so that you don't have to cognitively deal with them, they're predictable.
The word "predictable". What does it mean to be predictable? Are periodic trends with micro-variations considered to be predictable? In that sense, might it not be possible to Fourier-decompose some time-series into a sufficiently-"predictable" set of frequencies?
But actually, I'm not even sure if this qualification is needed. If an abstraction is basically just a way to treat a bunch of events as a single idea, then what if the abstraction isn't something telling you how you should act, but instead something telling you how you should react?
Another assumption, I think, is that the market is human, i.e. because there are affective dimensions and bounded rationalities in the economy that make it unpredictable. This is true right now, but is that inherent to the market? You can argue that even an automated agent has "humanity", in the sense that it is essentially imprinted with their creator, but how much longer will this hold? It's asymptotic, but won't there be a threshold at which the humanity of machines made by machines, with many steps removed, becomes negligible?
For example, the pet market is absurdly large. What drives this market? The actual needs of animals? Of course not. It's the wishes of humans that make that market as big as it is.
It doesn't even have to be that humans are smart enough to control the new market-playing agents. It can also be that human desire can so vastly dwarf whatever external agency has a wish to be in the market that the whole industry ends up catering the wishes of the humans.
Right now, human desire drives the market for robots. Can you even imagine a point at which robots could develop enough agency to even come close to supplanting the human desire for more and better robots? When does the tail stop wagging the dog here?
People sometimes forget the sheer scale of human economies. Sure, maybe your pet non-human agent might be able to command a few hundred thousand in market activity. Is it even going to be notable over all the other existing types of non-human agency already on the market, like pets and HFT?
A little bit OT: I don't think acting and reacting are separate things in the real world. We're always only reacting.
At present, the closest capability to computing within the network fabric itself is Fog Computing. Cisco's IOx-enabled line of products (https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/cloud-systems-managem...) pair a high-end router with decent computational capabilities. Other companies, like Nebbiolo Technologies (https://www.nebbiolo.tech/) or Fog Horn (https://www.foghorn.io/) provide Fog platforms that are not as locked to specific hardware.
If you would like more information on how Cloud, Edge, and Fog differ, I'll shamelessly plug our blog post from earlier this year:
Supercomputers were designed and built to be used to capacity (otherwise they would be a waste of money). Modern mobile phones and laptops are not.
1. No one actually knows where it is or what it means.
2. It conjures images of classical ‘edge compute’ use cases like the self driving cars in the article. Those use cases tend to be exceptionally specialized (or just silly).
3. Edge implies a core or origin exists, and maybe it doesn’t need to.
We would rather imagine a world where we embed the compute directly into the network, putting hundreds or thousands of points of presence within a few ms of everyone on earth. We imaging moving all the compute and storage there, not just some fraction which needs ultra speed. If it is easy to run code close to your users, and it’s affordable, there’s no reason everyone shouldn’t run everything as close to the consumers of the Internet as possible.