Our life with computers

[Suff]

I didn't want to put all of this in the post in reply to WM and aggers on the Café, it's boring for those who are not interested.

So I'll put the rest of it here.

The reason our lives are now run by computer? Time. The phrase "waiting for you ship to come in" was a phrase which visualised a sailing ship carrying the profit from your trade, some 3-6 months after you sent it out. Today if it takes 3-6 seconds, it's too long.

We live in a world where going to the library to find a book to do something is a waste of several good hours or days. When we expect that same information to be at the tips of our fingers.

Often people say to me, why don't you just pick up the phone to order your ticket. Let me explain to you what that entails for me buying a ticket on a TGV.

I want to go from Lille to Poitiers and back. But I have requirements.

1. I want the cheapest ticket
2. I want the direct train
3. I want an aisle seat, except when I can get two seats side by side when I'll take a window seat. I'll take a Solo seat but I prefer not to be facing someone else as it's a pain for my legs. I'll take an aisle seat in a club 4 but never, ever a window seat in one.
4. If I can't get the seating I want (only seen after you have selected the trains in both directions), then I'll take the next most expensive train but only in the direction I can't get my seating preference.
5. If I can't get a direct train with my seating preference, then I'll take an indirect route via Paris to do it but, preferably only the leg which does not have my seating preference.
6. I prefer to leave about 5pm but I can leave later if I can't get what I want. However I will take an earlier train rather than arrive in Poitiers near midnight.
7. If all else fails I'll take the late train route via Paris and arrive late.

Now you try explaining that to someone on the phone, every single time you book a ticket, up to 26 times a year..... I can do that in 5 minutes online. I can't even explain that to the person on the other end of the phone in less that 15 minutes if the person ever gets it at all and that person will be left thinking I'm the most awkward SOB on the planet. Given that it means I can actually walk when I go to get off the train it's important to me. The computer, on the other hand, accepts that I book and cancel the same route 5 times without complaint, efficiently and quickly and I don't wind up standing in the buffet car for 4 hours because I won't sit in the window seat of a Club4. It also remembers my preferences and offers me close to what I want each time which I can fine tune.

That is why computers won't go away and will only become more and more integrated into our lives. Because they are incredible enablers, no matter how much they are abused with frivolous trash to keep the lights on. It's like advertising on TV. Who actually watches them all? Eventually our society will evolve to ignore much of the trivia on the web and move on to enabling their lives with it, not bogging their lives down with it.

Many people my age used to be hardcore computer gamers. Today few of us even play games any more. We have more to do with our lives. Yet when we were younger it was a core part of our lives. The journey is still evolving and we have a long way to go before it becomes what we need.

That does not mean we should stop using them, throw the baby out with the bath water, lose all the incredible advances we have made in medicine, metallurgy, physics, plastics and just about every other thing we don't see in our lives which rely on computers. Right down to the glasses we perch on our faces who's lenses are machined by computer controlled milling machines to a tolerance better than the very best machinist on the planet can achieve. Ever time, so long as it is maintained.

That report I talked about, 1,000 bookkeepers, 3 months for one report. At £100 per day that's £9 million. You can buy one hell of a lot of computing power for £9m. It means less people can earn more money for the same job because the computer does the heavy lifting. Even China feels the pain of this. China has 5 areas of "special interest". These are the areas which service the consumerism of the west, they employ about 300m people and those people earn significant wages. The other billion on the other hand live in a different economy. One in which people get paid western daily pocket money per week. Where food and goods are sold at different prices and the economy is still a command economy.

This is a split society. One runs on computers and one does not.

We have barely started our journey in computing. We are not even close to the limit of our capabilities, we are close to the next breakthrough which will increase computing capability 100 fold. We are close to true biometric devices embedded in our bodies and using so little power they can use the sugar In our blood as fuel.

Our children/grandchildren or even great grandchildren will live in a world where they can talk to their computers, tell them what they like and do not like and get their computers to do all the digging and searching they would do themselves. The intelligence level of computers today is massively lower than a dog. As time goes on that will change and become more useful. Don't believe me? Try asking Siri what the colour blue smells like and listen to the answer. You will realise just how restricted the response is. Basically it will be some clever quip which, roughtly translated, means I have no clue what you are talking about and so I'm going to give a stupid and inane answer because I'm not clever enough to debate the question with you.

In the future our computers will be able to ask us just which particular object coloured blue we were talking about, whether it is flora or fauna, mineral, liquid or gas. Then it might be able to give a sensible answer or tell us that if we really want to know what that specific blue object smells like, then perhaps we'd need to find out what it is. Just as a human would.

Computers and computing hardware and software do not advance because someone would like them to. They advance because we buy them and use them. Or companies do. The more power we need, say, for online shopping or hardcore gaming, the more we want to pay for it, the faster they will advance.

I recall, in the mid 90's, some idiot in a computer magazine demanding to know why we would need more power than a 1ghz Pentium, that perhaps it would respond to us before we pressed the keys. The reality is that your average modem router which gives you your internet and wifi is now faster than that 1ghz Pentium. Look at the advances we have made with it. Mrs S has miniaturised digital hearing aids which would have been simply impossible at that time. We have mobile phones with 10 times the power of that old processor on which we do shopping, phone calls, read our mail, bank etc. All by the sheer power of the computers at our command.

Facebook spends hundreds of millions on ever faster hardware. So does Google, Amazon, Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft. They all drive the pace of change.

Where we stand today is simply the very rudimentary beginnings. Want to renew your driving license? Lift your government issued biometric secured device for registering services, press the shutter button to get a picture of you (assured by your biometrics), press a button and on your computer it opens the web service and fills everything out for you, swipe your phone over your home payment station and the payment is taken securely and it's done.

That is where computing will be in 1 to 2 decades. We still need to learn to walk. The most common feature of learning to walk is falling on our backside. Sometimes we fall on our face or into the coffee table, which is accompanied by a wail and some TLC, but we learn to walk all the same.

This is the computer industry today. It's just learned to roll over ready to crawl. Walking is a long, long way off.

[cruiser2]

Suff,
As you probably know, I am a silver surfer. But I can understand what you have said. I tried to book another cruise on the phone this morning with a well known cruise company. What a shambles.
Have got the cruise I wanted much cheaper by going on line and then spoke to a travel agent we use regularly.
We also do some shopping on line as the prices are cheaper and there can be free postage.
My eldest son deals with mobile phone design and I do not understand some of the technical words he uses.

[Workingman]

Eventually our society will evolve to ignore much of the trivia on the web and move on to enabling their lives with it, not bogging their lives down with it.

The splits are already noticeable.

The vast majority use the web as an entertainment medium. We have social networking, gaming, video and music downloading, blogs, messageboards, as we use on VV.

We also use it in our daily lives for banking, purchases and to do things we used to rely on snail-mail.

And as we have moved around the globe we go to things such as Skype and e-mail to keep in touch with out loved ones.

On the other side, reseach has become much easier. Papers that were once the privilege of academia are now available to all. FOI has made much more information available, even though its release still has to be challenged in court.

[Suff]

My eldest son deals with mobile phone design and I do not understand some of the technical words he uses.

But, really, you don't need to in order to remain relevant in terms of the web or to use it well. It's very specialised. I working in a company which has so many 2, 3 and 4 letter acronyms (over 500 of them), that they had to create a database of them. Even then I'm falling over more acronyms which have not made it into the database yet. It makes it very hard to fit in so I know exactly how you feel.

But, when you think about it, mobile phone design is the province of no more than 300,000 people world wide, if even that. Possibly even as low as 50,000 although the OS software development is certainly no more than 100,000.

Compared to the 1.7 billion people who use them?

They are not going away. Yesterday Raspberry Pi released a new Pi Zero which costs £4 for the basic model. Yet, with the right cables, it is a fully capable powerful computer which can do many things and certainly way more than my first smart phone. It can even be a media centre with a USB hub as it has HDMI for the Audio out...

For £4. OK you need a phone charger to run it, a special USB cable to connect peripherals and a mini HDMI cable to connect to a TV. Or, the Pi hut sells the kit for £6. Plus a SD card to boot it from for another £8. So for £18, you get a fully capable computer that can play media, browse the web and run programs for you.

Does it get any more pervasive that that??? I have the SD cards, the charger, the USB cable, hubs network adapters etc. All I need is a micro HDMI cable and I have another computer. Give it another 5 years and it will have USB C which will open it up to a whole world of stuff including power all from one port.

I'm waiting for the computer that hangs round my neck like a pendant, runs off a watch batter and wirelessly connects to my Windows holographic glasses which come with my phone and with a virtual keyboard and 3D sound from the earphones connected to the glasses.... I may see it in my lifetime. If not it will be shortly after it.

[Aggers]

You make a very good case, Suff., and I found it most interesting and informative,
and I have no doubt that what you forecast will eventually come about, unless of
course some cataclysmic cosmic event or a nuclear WW3 happens to put an end to
life as we know it.

Our children/grandchildren or even great grandchildren will live in a world where they can talk to their computers, tell them what they like and do not like and get their computers to do all the digging and searching they would do themselves.
.

I don't envy future children if life is like that. I'm darned sure they would not be
as happy, or as healthy as I was in my childhood. Thank God I was born in 1924.

[Rodo]

I mourn the gradual passing away of handwritten cards and letters. I feel it is a great loss to our lives. There is nothing I value more than receiving a lovely handwritten letter from my dear brother - a letter which I can hold in my hand and read over and over whenever I feel like it.

Despite this I am prettywell addicted to the internet now for chats, research and shopping, like the vast majority of people.

[Suff]

Perhaps this is where I differ a bit. I have always hated writing by hand, my writing is often illegible to me, unless I take so much time that it cramps my hand badly, so how is anyone else going to read it. Hand writing cards is as far as I go nowadays.

I was early to the tech world, which you would expect given my job. I was reading books using Adobe on my PC and using Microsoft reader on my Windows PDA, long before kindle was a word other than to start a fire or bring forward an idea.

I do not mourn the printed word on a physical book any more than the disciples of Caxton mourned the years it took to reproduce tomes of "great interest" deemed to be such as the bible. If we wanted to bemoan progress we could go back to vellum and papyrus.

Our history as a species is littered with the only options available to us at the technology of the time. Roman stonework. Would they have built with steel and concrete if it were available to them in that quality? Of course they would the dome of the Pantheon remains the largest non reinforced concrete dome in the world.

The tall ships with their acres of canvas to make it so fast around the world. Even rarer, the hybrid ships with steam and sail for those who did not trust the "new fangled steam technology" but could not afford to compete in a world that measured weeks to complete trades via steam compared to months by sail.

The forests of English Oak which were chopped down for the Tudor Navies and never replanted. Superseded by Iron and steel. I'm absolutely sure that plenty of people had to be convinced that Iron could float and would still prefer good old English Oak, even though the forests were no longer there to support their shipping.

Before the Newcommen steam engine the pumps to the coal mines were driven by herds of hundreds of horses. A steam engine so inefficient that when Watt provided his improvements, it could be reduced to a fraction of the size with massively more power. Today we pump our mines with electricity, some of which is still powered by coal and steam. However there were plenty who were suspicious of electricity.

Even with gas lights and electric lights people found they preferred candles which they could carry around with themselves. I'm sure if we carried out a health and safety comparison between candle and electricity we'd find that a living flame may be more warming, but certainly provides neither the light needed to do things nor the safety when left untended.

If there is one key thing which typifies the digital age, it is the pace of change. Forget space, space we did that and now true advancements in space will come from digital means. Just like the atom bomb. It took the evolution of computers to create the fission bomb because you could not compute the fields and forces fast enough without them. The apple watch has thousands of times more capability than those first computers that made the hydrogen bomb. So for space the developments which advance it will be driven by computers.

I grew up in the Atomic age under the threat of nuclear annihilation or nuclear winter when it was over. Eventually we stepped out of that groove and the money which chased the military industrial complex and the guaranteed profits it gave, started to chase other things. Technology things. Which had to be funded or there would be no return. The .com bubble emerged. Then the digital age was used to create a stock market bubble where the computers created "assets" so complicated that nobody could actually work out if they were worth anything or not and so had to take it on faith that the face value was warranted by the make up of the asset. Cue Enron and their "Debt Assets" rapidly followed by the financial crisis with their "subprime" mortgages backing AAA securities.

Now we are going round again. We're back to web 2.0 (.com 2.0 but we don't call it that because of the connotation), and the money is flooding into "social media". Which is worth what? It's just another subprime and will, eventually, go the same way.

Along the way our history of how we got there has been lost. Only structures the size of the pyramids lasting into the 5,000 year+ bracket. Roman ruins hardly lasting 2,000 years. Our digital age is hardly lasting 50 and we are already struggling to re-build the path to our digital prowess.

For me the pace of change is not fast enough. It could be a lot faster but the returns are less than the trivia of social media. For me the things to mourn are not the physical print, which will be long retained, or the vellum, or the pre technology civilisation. For me the loss will be our digital birth and how we managed to get from Analogue to Digital. Already many of the innovations on the way have been lost and buried. Not worth the paper to keep them on.

However let me just highlight one of the pieces I read about in the early 1990s in a hospital waiting room.

A company with many digital scientist had determined that the way we programmed our computers and the way we created the silicon to accept that programming was inefficient. To the tune of at least 4 to 5 times the performance factor. As in decades past, they brought their talent together and embarked on 5 years of research and development to re-think the way that we make and program our computers. After 5 years they finally had a working prototype of their processor and programming language. It was at least 3 times faster and far more efficient than the current Intel designs.

Did they win? No Intel changed construction material and ramped the speed of their inefficient processors and programming by 10 times. The company which had created the much more efficient way of computing and building computer processors could not compete. The way they had built their computer chip could not be easily scaled to so much speed without huge investments of new capital. This, they knew, was not going to work because 5 years after that Intel would just out engineer them again. Which proved to be true.

Where is that work today? It was proprietary company property with no resale value. The accountants will have deep sixed it at least a decade a go.

So, you might say, their work was useless, why do I mourn it?

Well, because the return for speed that Intel used to fend off the competition is now marginal. When that initial work was done the speed of a processor was in the 10-15mhz range. Today processors are in the 4-5ghz range. Nearly 350 times faster in sheer clock speeds. But that is only half the story. Is a 4ghz processor twice as fast as a 2gh processor? Not really, increase is not 200% and as each ghz ramps up, the increase diminishes.

So, I wonder, what would Intel give today, to have a technology in their hands which could increase the computational power of their existing processors by as much as 400%? Simply by changing the way they are designed and programmed.

Just like the nearly 2,000 year loss of the art of making concrete, when the Romans lost it, the things we are losing on our heading flight into hedonism and chasing money are legion. Except that we are likely to lose the key to our future independence and wealth in the next 50 years, rather than the next 5,000.

I do not bemoan what we have lost from times before. Except values of honesty and manners which seem to have vanished. But I do bemoan the short sighted hedonistic money chasing which is driving our best chance of a better future into the money gutter.

I won't say the future is truly bleak but the storm clouds are mounting and the party revellers are too drunk to see it.

[Rodo]

I prefer the printed book over any kindle or similar. I love my books. You can't beat the feel of a brand new book full of wonderful words. Bliss.

[Suff]

I like my books to, but as I keep telling Mrs S when she leaves the UK on holiday for any time; taking 3 books, when she reads a book a day, is not going to fly. Then I have to put up with the moaning and whinging, followed by her using her iPad all day (not to read books).

I, on the other hand, have a library of over 30,000 digital books along with a large share of our 2,000 odd physical books we have in the Library at home. My life does not allow me to carry enough physical books so I am happy with digital. Also, as the light changes and I can no longer see as well, I can't change the font on my book and I can't backlight it.

I'm sure the lovers of leather and vellum said something similar when we moved to paper books. About how they would never last, were cheap and smelled all wrong.....

In 100 years it will be no contest. Physically printed books will be an anachronism just like Vellum. Mooned over by people who want to live in the past. Progress will not be denied and we will progress.

Well if our species get's its collective head out of Facebook and has a look around at what is going on in the world..

[Aggers]

Suff - I do enjoy reading your posts, and must say that, although you may not think so,
I do agree with most of what you say.

My trouble is that I do not appreciate the fact that computers seem to be such fickle
and unreliable things. I resent the fact that other people can intrude on my property,
I,e, my laptop. If someone came into my house and start buggering about with my
library of books, I could do something about it, but the Internet allows any Tom, Dick
or Harry to access my computer and cause we to waste my valuable time trying to put
things back to how I want things.