Thanks for the comments on yesterday’s post! I’m hoping my comment in response helped to clarify things, and I will just start from there.
I think of the “edge” part of edge computing as analogous to the character of Archie Goodwin in Nero Wolfe, or the tail on a Stegosaurus. It’s a second brain which lets the system respond right away, at the very moment some response is needed. But it doesn’t replace the main brain — it just accommodates the fact that the main brain is further away, and so might not be able to respond immediately.
Yet what exactly constitutes the edge of a computing system is a moving target. After all, looming over our entire Age of Computers is the shadow of Gordon Moore.
His formulation of “Moore’s Law” in 1965 has proven to be eerily prescient. Many cybernetic innovations enter the world not because we’re getting smarter over time, but because computers grow about a thousand times more powerful every fifteen years or so.
Which means that local processing capability within the context of a larger connected network of powerful computers is a moving target. Over time, our definition of both “local processing capability” and “powerful computers” continues to evolve.
After all, as a great Jedi knight once observed about the hazards of trying to predict forthcoming events: “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”
I’m reminded of Ivan Sutherland’s “Wheel of Reincarnation”, where phones have taken over the roll of display processors.
If you go through Ivan’s reasoning, what he said made sense in 1968 precisely because there were no bandwidth or power issues to contend with. The insightful point he was making in that paper (via a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek presentation) was that people were trying to duplicate the same work in two places, when there was no inherent reason to do so.
I think if he were dealing with the situation we are facing today of (1) inherent limitations of long distance data transmission speeds to far-away servers, (2) inherent limitations of wireless digital communication, and (3) power challenges of small portable wireless devices, he would have come to a very different conclusion.