Behold: Huawei evokes always-wise God Cloud – with Terminator users

Start prayin'

Huawei Connect Tech metaphors are getting ever more explicitly spiritual. Take Huawei, for example. Today Huawei waxed ontological as one of its time-sharing CEOs described a “digital brain… always wise, never aging ... evolving in real-time.” That sounds like a God-cloud.

But will it, we mused, be a harsh God-cloud or a forgiving God-cloud? Which way will you pray to the God-cloud? Or will be it OK to the pray to the nearest cloud?

And if you sin, digitally, will you need to perform a digital penance?

CEO Ken Hu didn’t say.

Huawei has invited some 15,000 partners and customers to Shanghai to tell them all about its cloud ambitions. In the old days, an ICT vendor would show you a new box, and tell you it was a bit faster than their last box. They didn't feel the need to invoke the posthuman singularity.* But almost every one of Huawei's executive speakers evoked a posthuman singularity: which is an eschatology.

They may have been channelling the born-again Evangelical Kevin Kelly, one of its favourite “thinkfluencers”. Kelly hates humanity so much he can’t wait for the robots to take over.

For Huawei, the good old days were as recent as last year. What did it say today, then?

Huawei has begun to work with telcos and a stack of partners like SAP to create clouds: in its words, “thousands of clouds”. So it’s not one Digital Brain after all (phew). Huawei seemed particularly pleased with the three-faced T-Mobile cloud because Germany has demanding data hygiene regulations, and its success showed Huawei can be trusted.

"Huawei has no interest in [cloud] operations. We will provide IoT solutions to the partners," an executive told the press today. But for how long? Right now "partners" do lots of the work in the Huawei Cloud vision. SAP, Intel and Accenture. Data analytics specialists. But a while ago Huawei just made routers. Huawei now makes chips, so how long today's partners remain friendly remains to be seen.

HSBC's CIO told the audience that their CEO said HSBC "wasn't innovative enough", so his team had raced off to experiment with AI and robotics. How's that going to work out? We'll see, but he did acknowledge, in another slide, that contactless payments increased 50 per cent last year – and cybercrime had increased 100 per cent. Not having your money stolen is one of those things HSBC might value more highly than AI experiments. ®

Bootnote

One of the Huawei exec's slides showed a model cloud user: a Terminator-style cyborg. This isn't creepy at all, guys. Someone should have a word.