 Following on from our previous discussion on distributed systems, we're going to look at the somewhat inverse phenomena of technology convergence in this video. We'll talk about how technology has evolved through a process of increased differentiation and specialization, but how over the past few decades, information technology and service design are enabling the phenomena of mass convergence as disparate technologies and previously separate functions become merged into single devices and systems. We'll be talking about some of the challenges and benefits of this and why it is critical to dealing with the complexity to our next generation infrastructure. Since the advent of early stone and wood tools, technology has become increasingly differentiated into specialized functions. As today, one can find many millions of technologies and services available on the market. Whenever we have a major technological transformation or new energy source, like the advent of petroleum combustion, we get the emergence of a whole new ecosystem of technologies. We look back at the development of new consumer technologies in the 20th century. It was largely a history of different ways to apply the new found energy source of electricity and petroleum-based plastics, with the result being the proliferation of ever more consumer technologies filling ever more specialized functions. Today we're on the edge of a new technology revolution in the form of nanotechnology, the engineering of physical systems on the scale of atoms, which is opening up a whole new dimension to our world that can be engineered and again the proliferation of a new wave of technologies enabled by smart materials. And thus this process of technological differentiation continues today, with ever more specialized technologies, but at the same time the last few decades has also given rise to a quite radical technological convergence. Technology convergence is, as the name implies, the convergence of a number of disparate technologies or functions into a single integrated system. The internet and digital convergence are classical examples of this. Virtually all modes of telecommunications are rapidly converging upon the internet protocol as a single standard for telecommunications. Digital convergence refers to the merging of four distinct industries into one conglomerate. Information technology, telecommunications, consumer electronics and entertainment. The digital format is driving rapid convergence as a previously disparate array of media from books to television to films and photographs are all converging upon a single format. Electricity cables are starting to become information transporters as the internet infrastructure and power grids merge and as cars become electrical, they too are becoming merged into the power grid. Some of the major factors behind this convergence that we'll be discussing are primarily the information revolution and service design but also globalization and sustainable technologies. Information technology is central to this process of convergence as it is increasingly becoming the interface between people and the technology infrastructure that supports us. Devices such as smartphones or tablets allow us to access a wide variety of functions through a single interface. As we previously discussed the internet of things is driving massive convergence of hugely disparate technologies from tractors to washing machines to factories, they're all becoming operated through the internet protocol suite and often accessible through mobile devices and of course behind all of this is the so called cloud and computer virtualization as data is converging into centralized data centers. This architecture to next generation IT with on the one hand the centralized systems of cloud computing, big data and analytics and on the other the massive proliferation of mobile devices and internet of things devices is a good example of the complex interplay between increased convergence and divergence. As the CEO of Gardner the IT research and consulting company put it, quote in 2020 consumer IT and organization IT L1, digital capabilities all throughout your enterprise L1, digital is the business and the business is digital. The services revolution is an economic paradigm shift that moves the focus of economic activity from the provision of discrete products and technologies to providing end users with integrated services called product service systems. In this paradigm the focus is on the end user and providing them with not just a once off product but instead a seamless service experience. This is a much more sophisticated business and marketing model that adds value and differentiation and it is aligned with the dominance of the services sector within post industrial economies. The services revolution is a key factor leading to convergence in that it is focused on integrating disparate technologies into single seamless service experiences. Sustainability is also another driver of convergence but more on the macro scale as it requires us to focus on how different subsystems interoperate. In order to make whole systems more efficient and sustainable over their full life cycle. Sustainable cities are urban environments that are able to identify how their different subsystems can work together. Again this means designing integrated convergence systems. For example this might involve asking how the structure of the urban environment relates to its transportation system and how their energy consumption relates to the city's air quality and so on. Again this has a networking effect as we cut across traditional domains and it drives the convergence of different functions and silos onto common platforms. Lastly globalization is also a factor here. Creating a geographical convergence as infrastructure systems no longer stop at borders but become networked on a multinational and regional or even global level. Information technology, financial and economic frameworks allow us to create multinational markets as something like electricity can be traded across borders seamlessly. Creating interdependencies between previously autonomous national infrastructure systems. The best example of this being the European Union as it starts to create the regulatory frameworks for transportation and utility systems to span the entire continent. This process of rapidly increasing convergence creates both challenges and solutions within our technology infrastructure. On the positive side we have dematerialization as convergence typically means we can do more with less physical resources required. And dematerialization is very important to achieving sustainability. Convergence is also critical to dealing with the complexity of our next generation of technology and it also enables seamless processes instead of discrete siloed technologies and functions. But there are also many challenges including the heightened complexity of engineering these multifunctional systems that requires a much higher level of abstraction. Converting with ill-defined borders and systems boundaries is another challenge involving increased security risk and ensuring basic functionality despite greater complexity is an added engineering challenge. We'll go over each of these separately. Convergence requires the use of significant abstraction. Abstraction is where the system as a whole becomes increasingly removed from any individual instance of its functionality. An example of this might be a computer's operating system. Early mainframe computers had no operating system. One simply wrote an application and put it into the computer to be run and then the next person came along with their application and put that in. Of course each of these application developers had to write lots of low level code for maintaining the computer's hardware resources. Over time the modern operating system evolved in order to provide a generic platform for performing basic common hardware resource management. The operating system provided a layer of abstraction so that the computer's hardware could be easily used for many different applications whilst also being independent of any particular instance of those applications. In order to enable convergence new abstractions have to be invented, they have to work and be implemented. The complexity of designing and managing these complex systems is non-trivial. Convergence means our traditional well-defined borders become fuzzy. When things overlap it is no longer clear who is responsible or whose jurisdiction we're in. Traditional regulation and management structures that were designed as domain specific start to erode and appear less relevant. The overlapping and integration of many different systems and being able to access all of these systems through a single protocol creates significant security challenges. This interconnectivity and interdependence creates heightened risk of cascading failure. It becomes very difficult to understand and model all of the linkages and interdependencies within these complex networks. With convergence the end user wants to be able to switch seamlessly between different functions and domains. Building firewalls, buffers and redundancy in order to reduce failure propagation often reduces their capacity to do this and thus security may become more of a concern and more difficult to implement. Abstraction is the engine behind convergence. As mentioned these convergent technologies need many layers of abstraction in order to enable the many different functions they may be required to perform. Abstraction creates engineering challenges but it also creates functionality challenges because it typically involves a much higher number of dependencies within the system. As the number of functions in a single device escalates the ability of that device to serve its original basic function decreases. For example the iPhone which by its name implies that its basic functionality is that of a phone can perform many different tasks and thus the telephone's functionality is dependent upon many levels of abstraction involving millions of lines of code with many possible errors occurring. Compared to this a simple monofunctional telephone will likely be much more reliable and trustworthy because it is monofunctional and involves a much lower level of abstraction. So these are some of the challenges to convergence we'll now talk about some of its benefits. Convergence and abstraction are in many ways central to the solution space of dealing with the complexity to our industrial systems. As Oliver Holmes once said, quote, I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Convergence is in many ways the only hope for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. These factors driving convergence in particular product service systems integrating technologies into seamless processes and information technology providing a single interface are critical to dealing with the complexity. They are central to encapsulating the complexity of next generation infrastructure and providing end users with integrated solutions. A corollary to this is that convergence enables processes instead of discrete functions. We live in a world where we have to stay switching between devices and systems. With convergent technologies functions can be string together into processes and processes are really how our lives work. Often quite simple ones like going to pick up the children from school. We would interact with many technologies in the process of this activity from our coat to the house security system to the car to the transportation system to one's mobile phone and so on. All of these systems are completely ignorant of the fact that they are part of enabling some process. We spend our time continuously coordinating these different technologies into the processes that we're performing. Convergence through product service systems and information technology offers the possibility of taking us into a much more process orientated world. In this video we've been talking about some of the drivers to the process of technology convergence as IT and service design increasingly cut across and break down traditional silos between individual technologies and functional domains. We looked at some of the benefits and challenges to this process including the creation of fuzzy borders, security issues and the challenges of increased abstraction. Convergence illustrates once again one of the major themes of complexity that is a core tension between integration on the systems level and differentiation of the components on the local level as our interface with these systems of technology may become integrated with functionality converging while at the same time underneath this the actual technology that enables this may become increasingly differentiated and specialized.