Life as a Service (LaaS)?

About digitalization and not only, and not so much and not at all.

Life as a Service ( ZhKU ) or in English Life as a Service (LaaS) found expression in the minds of several people or groups of people: here it was examined from the perspective of the general digitalization of life, the transformation of all its sides into services and the required new political system capitalism, but herea self-critical view from the USA considers the service of life as an attempt to solve the problem of excessive spending of resources (recognizing that Americans spend 4 times more resources than the entire planet provides sustainably). What unites these views is the identification of a tendency to abandon private property, such as vehicles, computing devices, homes, and even clothing. However , to what extent does the concept of life as a service really correlate with the widely known IaaS , SaaS , PaaS , and with which of them it is possible to make a comparison? How to ensure safety and compliance with ethical standards, our own worldview in the new conditions: consider the existing problems and some of their solutions.

Today I also came to realize the concept of life as a service, not even knowing that such thoughts have already been expressed. But I discovered this new concept for myself as a warning, as a border that cannot be crossed, as a reminder that life cannot be imagined as a service. On the other hand, the disclosure of thoughts becomes a service due to the openness of the network and the presence of search engines. Thought as a service allows you to instantly find like-minded people and evaluate the difference between their own views and theirs, while search engines create an invisible library, which really looks more like a dump, but also dump jewelry into dumps like recently with bags of money. But the network space can be reminiscent of a landfill precisely because the thinking of mankind is this landfill, that is, the language itself as a service is a landfill of thoughts. But what distinguishes intelligence is its ability to accurately identify grains from the chaff, even if all grains are uncertain and probabilistic. So with property, in the end, all tenants and owners are only temporary owners, although it seems to them that they can transfer their rights to children and grandchildren in infinity, ad infinitum. But first you need to give birth and raise children, and then it will be their right to accept the gift of our property from us or to go our own way, unencumbered by property. that they can, in abstraction, transfer their rights to children and grandchildren ad infinitum. But first you need to give birth and raise children, and then it will be their right to accept the gift of our property from us or to go our own way, unencumbered by property. that they can, in abstraction, transfer their rights to children and grandchildren ad infinitum. But first you need to give birth and raise children, and then it will be their right to accept the gift of our property from us or to go our own way, unencumbered by property.

My concept of ZhKU differs from the above-stated statements of social changes in the way of everyday life in which the service sector expands so much that it fills almost the entire visible universe of everyday thinking. The difference is in a different angle of view on what is happening: instead of full digitalization, I assume limited, and life itself as a service in literal decoding is nothing more than an analogy of a person’s action as a machine, that is, performing some kind of work as part of his life. Earlier in the record “On Service Performance”I have identified the differences between people as providing services and, in this case, providing software or an operating system as a service from a genuine creative path, the essence of which cannot be reduced to the concept of services. For example, you can hire a photographer or order an artist a picture (and this was for different eras) and in this case, the likelihood of turning creativity into a service is high, or you can refuse this institutionalization and remove and write without any regard to the monetary system and pragmatic significance. This is the meaning of the previously proposed concept of cultural pragmatismaccording to which not only monetary, but also any practical motivation is associated with a pragmatic principle, while the cultural principle uses other grounds and much deeper aspirations. For example, religious and philosophical creativity, the desire to know the world in physics and the discovery and application of pure mathematics frame the cultural pragmatism with the beginning for the development of human activity, although I regard cultural pragmatism as a phenomenon of postmodern society (postmodern) as applied to modern times. Therefore, in a dream or a house, a car as a service, we can find completely different manifestations: from the provision of a certain set of hotels network corresponding to quality standards, taxi booking services to the uncertainty of providing apartments for co-residence within a certain community (for example, fans or travelers), getting a friend's car to "ride." And in this regard, we can apply the degree of depth of service found in the field of information technology to consider all other aspects of life in the field of service provision.

As you know, in connection with the development of cloud technologies, instead of owning equipment, you can now use equipment remotely for rent. It can be network devices or computing power. But equipment for rent is only the first level, although the deepest, in the direction of service provision, is the receipt of technical Infrastructure as a service or abbreviated IKU (Eng. IaaSfrom Infrastructure as a Service). But in this case, as with the house, we get only “iron” or “concrete”, that is, bare walls, electricity and water failed. The way we will use water and electricity, to create an internal climate in the apartment for life - this is the business of the residents. In fact, an apartment building is similar to a server cluster, from which parts can be commissioned for certain needs. But within the framework of IKU, users do not receive either an operating system for computing or applications. If they receive them over the network, then we accordingly move to the model of the Platform as a Service or PKU (Eng. PaaS from Platform as a Service) and the Software as a Service or PKU (Eng. SaaSfrom Software as a Service). It is important that in each case, the cloud holders not only provide the right to use, they provide constant maintenance and updating of what they provide, as well as solve emerging issues. In fact, our house corresponding to the IKU model should have security and support services for residents, that is, be considered together with the managing organization. In the PKU model, the indicated services are also supplemented with conditions for the direct implementation of user tasks by application tools, that is, the presence of an operating system, database management systems, network services, while the selection and maintenance of finite and intermediate tools (such as content management systems, office and production applications) for solving problems remains with the user. For the home, such fundamental foundations for home life consist of storage places (an analogue of the file system), working and sleeping places, amenities and places for entertainment with equipment and internal software (and TVs, refrigerators already include operating systems in which you can increasingly install applications; beds usually do not have an operating system, but this only means that such an operating system is not automatically configured, however, the bed itself with a mattress and are platform, while bed linen - analog sample application). Basically, the concept of PkU corresponds to furnished apartments and rooms with supported bath and toilet facilities. Finally, PokU model means providing already configured (at least installed and updated) and ready-to-use software. In this model, we can not even guess which operating system provides the processing of our data, in the first place we will simply evaluate the versions of database management systems and software environments, the amount of available memory, speed and reliability of the connection. Although for security purposes and in accordance with our own principles of business and life in general, we will be required to clarify all the technical details and compare various policies, from ethical and environmental policies to the actual security policy. In fact, we do not break our connection with a reference to our own life, our worldview, just one of the elements common today is functionalism and self-avoidance from ethical transactions, when people are likened to those non-ferrous metal merchants who do not bother to clarify the origin of the objects of reality they are buying and reselling. Similarly, the dissemination of the concepts of IKU, PkU and PokU can increasingly alienate people from the idea that air coolers work in computing and data centers, not the most heat-efficient solutions are used, but cheaper or more reliable, which leads to more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere today. Also, with security, a personal inspection may be required accompanied by appropriate specialists to establish compliance with the requirements and monitor the actual implementation of the declared policies. Therefore, in fact, we are faced with a paradox in the transition to servicing the increasing need for control and management of delegation of responsibility, while formally most often the conversion of personal content and maintaining equipment and provision into a service is declared as getting rid of the “headache” associated with the accompanying processes. But this can happen mainly only in cases where the user has so little thought about issues of backup and archiving, improving reliability, the impact of his property on the environment, and ensuring safety. But in this case, even familiarization with the measures, accepted by professional owners of computing devices and software, it will already require him to study the basics of computer literacy in order to get some idea of ​​them and not only the basics in order to be able to control the activities of the services that provide him. Similarly, when we check into a hotel, we start using soap, shampoo, water, lunch and dinner in a restaurant, sleeping on provided bedding, but we don’t usually think that soaps and shampoos contain harmful substances, water does not undergo sufficient cleaning before and after its use, the food in the restaurant does not correspond to any ethical and religious beliefs. In this case, we are already unconsciously applying the PokU model, and the analogue of the software in this case is bed, kitchen, toilet, television support. It can be called not programmatic, but programmable in the sense in which it is defined by the local social and organizational culture and language scenarios.

But everyone knows about variable forms of furniture and even exoskeletons that turn even the body into a service, especially if the exoskeleton or avatar can be rented. Already today there are not only transformer mechanical chairs, but also digital ones. What type of cloud service model can be attributed to this solution:

Having chosen PokU and having received only initial information about the organization of activities to provide services and support, we therefore always make a compromise in the era of postmodernity, or we can try to minimize this compromise and try to find a PokU that meets security requirements, for example, which are not used potentially dangerous chemical elements or find “green” servers, for which energy use only renewable energy sources. The problem is that, like for other mass-provided services, we agree with some institutionally defined set of rules, such as privacy policy or compliance with the legislation of a particular country, but we often do not have time,

Scaling the concept of cloud computing to other aspects of public life, we can draw up the following table, corresponding in general to the ideas about Society 5.0.

Table. The correlation of cloud service concepts with some elements of private and public life. * Note: “kU” means the abbreviation “as a service”.

In general, people can be at different levels of approaching “life as a service”: for example, renting a cottage, having an apartment in the city and using a hotel on vacation, just like they can use their own customized operating system and office applications at home, use customized ones at work the employer, making the necessary additions, and on the road go into the cloud office and business applications. It is important to understand that irrespective of the distribution of the QoS model, employers have actually provided QoS for employees, highlighting the units responsible for the corresponding functionality, that is, they provided employees with services for installing and maintaining software to perform functions at the workplace. On the other hand,

Earlier, IKUs already partially belonged to service centers of manufacturers or third-party centers where computers were serviced, and manufacturers of portable devices made extensive use of the level of PKU, supplying devices with operating systems and a basic set of applications. Today, the idea of ​​assembling a phone from accessories can cause some bewilderment, while self-assembly of desktop computing devices is still a normal process, although it is becoming less common. On the whole, the shifts themselves from the level of ownership to IKU, then to the level of PKU and further from the level of PKU to the level of PKU are considered as a simplification of life, lowering associated costs. But here it’s important to understand that there is equipment and infrastructure, which is really idle and can be more effectively used with the spread of network organizations and technologies, such as cars or computers, an oven, a bed, a mixer, a drill, on average, not used for most of the day, unlike a taxi fleet and servers, but there are houses in which people live their whole lives, bookcases in which they keep family books, a refrigerator, almost completely loaded with wholesome food, etc. People “merge” with things and deplanning can mean the loss of oneself. The choice of a technological model means not only a choice of political preferences, but also a philosophical change in the mode of existence: a shift from settledness in favor of nomadism. Reducing transaction and infrastructure costs will make it possible to turn life into services more and more and live more independently of place and function. This increase in efficiency is necessary to save the planet, so people just need to give up attachments and splices, but they should be selected and preserved if necessary, special feelings and attachments, especially since the paper library at home can even reduce greenhouse gas emissions: instead the operation of a computing device, reading an analog book does not require additional energy, and its production either binds part of the carbon in the used wood, or will eliminate landfills ( If recycled plastic) will be used for pages.

Life as a service (ZhKU) can be viewed from two sides: on the one hand, it is the embodiment of the life of those people who organize and perform the provision of services to us, that is, the embodiment of the cloud services and experiences that we receive, we receive a part of other people's lives and enter it into your life as an impression in those periods when we get PokU. On the other hand, it is our own life, in relation to which we apply either our own norms, views, beliefs, attitudes, or trust in the attitudes and scenarios of the world around us, but we influence one way or another on the lives of others, sometimes directly providing services, performing actions. Usually in social phenomena this process of mutual influence is two-way. But for example in popular culture, it is often replaced by a predominantly unidirectional process of influence from a position of trust in idols or brands. It is in this case that we risk "turning a blind eye" to violations of confidentiality, security and going against our own feelings and beliefs. And often in the case of digitalization, this means trust in technology, which even begins to be considered “neutral.” But this assumption can create a source for illusions about security if, for example, we trust some technology, ratings and reviews, while traveling to an unknown country, selecting a suitable driver and homeowner. In this world, even a reliable and truthful story cannot mean an acceptable level of reliability, while the mass news and public statements themselves are increasingly at odds with reality.

In the materials indicated at the beginning of the article, the ZhKU concept is considered from the perspective of a mass consumer seeking services in the digital era and is considered as the basis for a more efficient use of resources, objects of reality that cease to be property. But, as is correctly noted in the comments on these visions, the concept of ownership in this case does not disappear, it is rather transferred to the control or ownership of service providers, from hotels with restaurants to cloud computing centers. As for the levels, the authors consider almost entirely only the level of Poku, citing as examples numerous applications and nodes related to different aspects of our lives. But it’s like a theater: you can’t turn it into an online movie theater, and a page with a rating of theaters is not the same at all, what a page with top restaurants. In the end, on the pages where people reveal their own zin, you can find its components, but only until they become pages for the provision of services (this is the difference between personal culture and pragmatism). On the whole, one can question the principle of mapping cultural phenomena onto a network space and the possibility of representing the cultural part of any side of life in digital format, because in the best case this mapping is only a strong distortion, but not at all approaching the abstraction of reality that we achieve , for example, using languages. until they become service delivery pages (this is the difference between personal culture and pragmatism). On the whole, one can question the principle of mapping cultural phenomena onto a network space and the possibility of representing the cultural part of any side of life in digital format, because in the best case this mapping is only a strong distortion, but not at all approaching the abstraction of reality that we achieve , for example, using languages. until they become service delivery pages (this is the difference between personal culture and pragmatism). On the whole, one can call into question the principle of mapping cultural phenomena onto a network space and the possibility of representing the cultural part of any side of life in digital format, because in the best case this mapping is only a strong distortion, but not at all approximating the abstraction of reality that we achieve , for example, using languages.

But nevertheless, with the advent of the possibility of renting personal vehicles and even finding a fellow traveler within the framework of a common platform or renting out the right to live in one’s own apartment, one can also expect the emergence of an independent computer network for solving office and entertainment tasks, wider distribution of storage networks similar to what is today exists for scientific distributed computing or for the issue of cryptocurrencies, for the distribution of files. But here there are a number of serious problems that do not allow the spread of certain technological solutions, such as independent search engines, as a public and common service. Firstly, openness in itself is often in the field of globalization, which may in fact be unacceptable to most people on the planet, so the decisions in which each person’s own participation is supposed to be regarded as an attempt to oblige each apartment owner to accept a certain number of guests per year. Secondly, the business models themselves are based on the monetization of advertising and the information provided, which ensures the activity of the largest information corporations, but which users may prefer to refuse or want to limit if they think about it. Thirdly, more beautiful and correct solutions often turn out to be more complex and costly to master and maintain, even if they are distributed free of charge. In fact, here we find the key parameter of POS: often the costs of maintenance, transaction, maintenance and security, and even more so the assessment of social and environmental impacts are much greater than the usual perceived upfront costs. But on the other hand, the same costs and risks exist with respect to traditional services, especially with regard to QoS, although in traditional service organizations the methods for reducing the corresponding risks are rather industrial. What may not be enough so far, but that may already be a vision of the future, is a system of independent quality assessment and relevant quality parameters by which services can be evaluated. One part of such a system can be reviews of acquaintances and friends whom we trust and who are competent in a particular area. Another part may be independent audits, which are now carried out by journalist-auditors with a visual representation of the ongoing procedures, but again it is desirable so that the conclusions are reduced to generally accepted criteria and are available for automated analysis. And another part can be open broadcasts of the process of providing services, for example, a camera installed in a taxi or in a restaurant’s kitchen, reports filmed by guests, visitors to data and computing centers, etc.

Although it will be difficult to evaluate and review all such materials, on the one hand, modern technologies for processing big data and augmented reality will solve the problem of video processing including live broadcasts over time. The creation of such a system will reduce the uncertainties associated with the transformation of life into services and will lead to increased awareness regarding this process. But in this case, “mass” culture itself will lose its significance, because it will return to diversity in which many territories, groups, people will compete on general conditions, but based on different cultural settings, where it will be possible to evaluate the process of cooking and washing clothes just like the energy efficiency of a data center cooling system.

I think it is advisable to preserve the islands of “closeness” and not turn some aspects of life into services, but in general, the quality of life as open and confirmed, understandable and effective services should increase many times, including because the unreasonable pricing for services of confirmed quality in the ocean will disappear dullness, as well as significantly reduced institutional and transaction costs, such as confirmation of compliance with standards, filling out numerous forms, obtaining permits, as well as studying and composting variety of information. But the main thing is that openness regarding the features of the provision of services leads to the disclosure of the process as part of life, and even if this is not all life, but at least its pragmatic part, it allows you to establish a process of bilateral interaction between the parties providing and receiving services,

Conclusions: services, and in particular those based on digital technologies, reveal only one aspect of life, namely its pragmatic part, aimed at achieving a certain well-known state and meeting a set of quality standards. Above, we compared 3 levels of penetration of services into life both for cloud technologies and for other aspects of life, where digital technologies also penetrate.

Levels indicate the gradual replacement of independently carried out actions by achieving similar states on the part of controlled external processes controlled by people, or directly by people. Levels and comparisons can be applied both to the lives of individuals and their associations in small groups, as well as in organizations. An attempt to give the concept of “life as a service” a worldview interpretation is refuted by confirmation that life as a service is only one of its many aspects and cannot be reduced to the service sector without losing its existential content.