The Network is the Robot

Ultra-broadband diffusion, information technology (IT) advances and the market mass decreasing costs are determining a growing adoption of processing and storage resources at the edge of current telecom networks that, ultimately, are the end-users. The number of devices connected to the network is growing at an exponential rate: embedded communications are everywhere. "Machine intelligence" is rapidly migrating towards the end-user, determining a number of socio-economic implications. Smart cities are going to become populated by any sort of mobile terminals, devices, machines, smart things, sensors, actuators, drones, robots etc. In general, ICT will basically become accessible to enterprises in any part of the world on an (almost) equal basis. In turn, this will reduce the thresholds for new players to enter the ICT services markets, moving the competition towards Opex-based models. This tendency is progressively accelerating and, from a socio-economic perspective, it is going to determine a transition from our society and the economy of resources towards the digital society and the digital economy. In this evolutionary scenario, telecommunications services are likely to be packaged with other services, and new services paradigms will be exploited: as an example, this paper proposes the model "anything-as-a-service", where any devices, machines, smart things, robots, drones, etc. will look like edge intelligent nodes providing the end-users with "any services". This transformation will require an highly flexible and pervasive 5G network, embedding processing and storage and providing high bandwidth, ultra-low latency links so as to create, literally, an innovative "nervous system" for the digital society. Eventually, this evolution will be capable of modernizing urban services such as transport, energy, water, food, education and will create new business opportunity, by integrating, systemically, 5G, big data and robotics