Timely and Massive Communication in 6G: Pragmatics, Learning, and Inference

5G has expanded the traditional focus of wireless systems to embrace two new connectivity types: ultra-reliable low latency and massive communication. The technology context at the dawn of 6G is different from the past one for 5G, primarily due to the growing intelligence at the communicating nodes. This has driven the set of relevant communication problems beyond reliable transmission toward semantic and pragmatic communication. This article puts the evolution of low latency and massive communication toward 6G in the perspective of these new developments. At first, semantic/pragmatic communication problems are presented by drawing parallels to linguistics. We elaborate upon the relation of semantic communication to the information-theoretic problems of source/channel coding, while generalized real-time communication is put in the context of cyber-physical systems and real-time inference. The evolution of massive access toward massive closed-loop communication is elaborated upon, enabling interactive communication, learning, and cooperation among wireless sensors and actuators.