The Cloud is a vast supercomputer that you only get to access in short bursts. That’s because you are sharing this supercomputer with everybody else on the planet.
But because the people who run the Cloud are trying to maximize their profit, they are interested in providing the greatest service for the lowest cost to themselves. This leads them to put a lot of effort into load balancing, and making sure that no single request can tie up too many of their resources.
From your perspective as a user of the Cloud, the result is that if you pose a relatively small and contained problem, the Cloud can afford to throw a large amount of computational power into solving your problem, but only for a very short amount of time.
The way this will work with the future of edge computing is that your Near Edge computer will be a kind of go-between between the Cloud and your Far Edge wearable, negotiating between the enormous potential power of the former and the instantaneous needs of the latter.
This is all going to translate into a gradation in the level of semantic functioning across the system — low level semantics at the Far Edge, all the way up to high level semantics in the Cloud.
More on that tomorrow.