"A butterfly flaps its wings in China, and sometimes later a thunderstorm drenches Chicago. We've all heard some variation of that description--of how one event can contribute to a seemingly unrelated event through a series of exquisite and intricate interactions . . . ."

2. A butterfly flaps its wings in China, and sometimes later a thunderstorm drenches
Chicago.
We’ve all heard some variation of that description, of
how one event can contribute to a seemingly
unrelated event through a series of exquisitely
intricate interactions.
This old proverb can apply directly to the way our
world works—the way ever person, business,
government, natural system and man-made system
interacts.
Intelligence is no longer the domain of individual
inventors laboring for years in isolation, before
bringing out their inventions for the rest of the world
to apply.
It happens faster now, and diffuses much more rapidly
into our everyday lives.

3. It’s open, multidisciplinary and inherently
collaborative, taking place across communities and
among millions of people we will never meet.
The list of problems we face is well known: A
financial crisis; climate disruption; energy
geopolitics; and food supply hazards.
What they show is that we’re all connected like never
before. Like the butterfly flapping its wings, when a
crisis occurs on one part of the planet, it can bring
problems to another part, within days or even hours.
For example, consider how gridlocked our cities are:
traffic congestion in the U.S. costs $78 billion a year.
Consider how inefficient our supply chains are:
Consumer product and retail industries lost about $40
billion a year due to inefficiencies. That lost money
could be put to better use.
Consider how our planet’s water supply is drying up:
Water use has risen at twice the rate of population
growth since the 1900s, while half the world’s people
lack adequate sanitation.

4. And consider how antiquated our healthcare
system is: In truth, it isn’t a “system” at all. It
doesn’t link to diagnosis, to drug discover, to
insurers or to employers.
So we’re headed for a wall at breakneck speed. And
every day we don’t address the problems facing
our society is another day closer to squandering
the future instead of winning it.
But there’s good news.
The systems and technologies that underpin so much
of how the world works are becoming smarter.
We live in a time of unprecedented advances in every
sector of human endeavor. New advances bring new
ideas, which can have profound and positive impact
on our planet.
In the IT industry alone, we’re seeing the coming of
age of a whole new generation of intelligent systems
and technologies—more powerful and accessible than
ever before.

5. In the same way that the Hubble telescope changed
400 years of thinking about the physical universe,
the infusion of intelligence into society’s systems
will change the way the world literally works.
These systems and processes enable physical goods
to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold;
services to be delivered; and billions of people to
work and live.
Three things have brought this about. First, the world
is becoming instrumented. Sensors are being
embedded everywhere: in cars, appliances, cameras,
roads, pipelines—even in medicine and livestock.
Second, the world is becoming interconnected—1.2
billion people, millions of businesses, and a trillion
devices access the Web today.
And with computational power being put into things
we wouldn’t recognize as computers, think of a trillion
connected and intelligent things, and the oceans of
data they will produce.
Third, all of these instrumented and interconnected
things are becoming intelligent. This means they can
link to power new backend systems that process all
that data and turn it into real insights in real time.

6. These new ways to work and thing generate not
just new products, but new industries. And not just
new knowledge, but new ways of working together.
What wasn’t visible before is becoming visible for
the first time, and this will change the conventional
wisdom about our planet’s infrastructure forever.
Picture a smarter global food system that uses clever
RFID tags to trace meat and poultry from the farm,
through the supply chain, to the store itself.
Picture a pharmaceutical company using data mining
to analyze information to help doctors make better
diagnoses and treatment decisions, develop new
drugs and predict health issues before they happen.
Picture home appliances that are smart enough to tell
you how efficiently they are running, shut themselves
off when energy use peaks, or perform diagnostic
tests without you having to call a repair person.
Picture a high-tech computing system that cured
traffic gridlock in Stockholm Sweden by directly
identifying and charging vehicles depending on the
time of day.

7. The success of projects like these signals the
coming of age of a whole new generation of
technologies that are more powerful and accessible
than ever before.
But as with any intelligent system, you need more
than just cutting-edge technology to be successful.
You need to analyze how things flow, how people
interact,
How processes can be more productive and human, We live in a complex universe. Throughout human
history we’ve attempted to illuminate those
complexities—to explain them, predict where they will
lead us, and search for ways to use them.
Oil exploration, earthquake prediction, water
management have begun to use smart systems to find
the big answers to the big questions.
and then bring together the abundance of
technologies, skills, approaches and capabilities that
makes true innovation possible.

8. Will we ever know which butterfly caused which
storm? Or what’s out there waiting for us among
the starts?
With all of these smart technologies and systems at
hand, we have a change to journey into unchartered
terrain, to experiment, be more creative, rethink
assumptions,
and stretch our limits as far as the mind can imagine.