The re-emergence of Asimov's Multivac?

Link to an FT article on the emergence of massive computer centralisation occurring (hat tip Nick Carr):

According to Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid, around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies - he named Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon. That is an amazing statistic, and certainly not one I’d heard before. And this is before cloud computing has really caught on in a big way.

It sounds like an awful lot of computing power to throw at amateur video and would-be replacements for Microsoft’s Office. Rashid, who was speaking at a small dinner in San Francisco last night, suggested one or two more constructive ways this massive new computing resource might be used.

This is the interesting point:

Rashid says it’s too soon to speculate on all the ways the handful of globally distributed mega-computers will change the world. But he adds this: every time there’s a transition to a new computer architecture, there’s a tendency simply to assume that existing applications will be carried over (ie, word processors in the cloud). But the new architecture actually makes possible many new applications that had never been thought of, and these are the ones that go on to define the next stage of computing.

Science Fiction writer Isaac Asimov imagined a global, omnipresent supercomputer accessed by multimedia tablets - Multivac. When mainframes fell out of favour this vision was neglected. Cometh the cloud, returneth the Multivac dream?