Now is an exciting time to be an engineer or technology enthusiast. We’re starting to see ideas that were talked about as only concepts in science fiction making their way to the mainstream. Many of these new flashy technologies, like the self-driving car, will be enabled in some way, shape, or form by 5G.
The epitome of science-fiction technology, though, is artificial intelligence (AI). It’s the robot that will interact with us, or in the case of some horror films, be humanity’s ultimate downfall. While we’re still years away from having a robot like the one on the TV cartoon The Jetsons doing our housework, 5G and AI are helping speed up the pace. Not only do they enable each other, but their fates are somewhat intertwined. 5G provides the infrastructure and massive amounts of data that AI needs to be successful, and AI, driven by advances in machine learning, provides the ability to make sense of the chaos and complexity of 5G.
To be clear, 5G is a set of new technologies, while AI is not. The basic algorithms used by machine learning to create AI have been relatively unchanged for the last 30 years. The concept, called backpropagation, is fairly simple. Data sets and the expected outcomes associated with them are input into a processor, and it outputs a pattern. The more data sets and outputs that are used as inputs to the processor, the more accurate the resulting pattern. Machine learning thrives with massive amounts of data, and 5G will create massive amounts of data.
Latency
One of the defining characteristics of 5G that makes it dramatically different than previous standards is the fact that it has a spec for latency built in (the target is 1 ms). Figure 1 from GSMA Intelligence presents a visual diagram of various applications that rely on cellular networks. The applications in gray are the ones that require some combination of the massive bandwidth and throughput promised by 5G in addition to tight latency requirements.
Read the rest here: https://www.electronicdesign.com/industrial-automation/article/21807565/brave-new-world-everything-gets-smarter-when-5g-and-ai-combine
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