Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but it was not this and other singular innovations that separated him from contemporaries. Edison appreciated the value of a system. He built the nation’s first electrical distribution network through General Electric, which opened a new economy for electric-powered devices.
Joseph Salvo, Ph.D., also appreciates the value of a system. Salvo is the manager of the Pervasive Decisioning Systems Laboratory at the GE Global Research Center in Niskayuna, N.Y.
To describe “pervasive decisioning systems” to the average person, Salvo refers to a natural phenomenon called swarm intelligence. The ant is barely a “conscious” creature, but a swarm of ants can respond to its environment in very sophisticated ways. Ant swarms can cross streams, deforest huge areas, and organize large, underground colonies.
“The system of ants is very powerful,” he says. Evolution did not favor ants with the biggest brains or the most memory. It selected them for survival of the fittest. What, then, do ant swarms have in common with complex decisions in transportation and logistics? Plenty, Salvo says.
We have left the Information Age and entered the Systems Age. In the Systems Age, everyone is drowning in data. Digital content is so pervasive and so inexpensive, and storage is so cheap. Instead of throwing content away, we often become paralyzed by it, he says.
In this new age, the concept of the physical object is gone, and so is the value of content and data alone. We operate in a “knowledge economy,” where value is gained by what you create in the virtual space. Several years ago, for instance, the value of a cell phone was equal to its value as an object – a phone. Today, the value includes a calculator, calendar, media entertainment center, translator and more.
“People are spending thousands a month on a device that used to be a phone, and they can justify it,” Salvo says. “It went from being a box to a brain.”
