The Secret Network Society
And eventually the number of people who retain knowledge of network configuration will diminish, until only a small number of graybeards actually know how it all works...
Two years ago, before ChatGPT turned the tech industry on its head, Juniper CEO Rami Rahim boasted that by 2027 artificial intelligence would completely automate the network. Juniper is due to become part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's IT empire late this year or early next, and the dream of self-configuring networks is still …
Some form of AI has been around in networking for a long time. In my old company in ca. 1998, we had a software solution that would sniff enterprise networks and use a probabilistic model to detect intrusions and leakages based on anomalies in network behavior. More recently, in ca. 2010, a customer's Network Access Control solution did a similar job in a faster and better (but not cheaper) manner by using an ASIC chip to run the probabilistic model inside of itself instead of relying on the central server's computing power to do so. To be sure, neither of these solutions had machine learning. I'm guessing modern AI will do the same job faster, better and maybe cheaper, and use ML. While that's nothing to be sneezed at, it's unlikely to be transformational for the forseeable future.