Hello, those of you embarking on a new year 1959. We are just wrapping up the year 2008. It has had its ups and downs, and many people here may not consider it a very good one – we’re in a bit of an economic pickle right now, we’re involved in a war (don’t worry, it’s not a nuclear war,) and we’re all worried about our troops, and global politics remains “interesting.” Still, I wanted to tell you what you might have to look forward to in the next 50 years.
First, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I live and work in Austin, Texas, in the United States. My job title doesn’t exist yet, so it would be hard to explain what I do for a living. I’ll give it a try.
For a living, I write about computers – specifically, the connections that let computers talk to each other. It’s fairly specialized, and I am the editor of… a sort of a periodical about maintaining the connections between the computers that let them talk to each other, and by extension, let people talk to each other.
It gets a little more confusing after that – my periodical isn’t printed on paper. Instead, I use a computer to write it, then it gets distributed through the interconnected computer network – an “inter-net” – to computers worldwide. Anyone with a computer, and a connection to the Internet, can read what I have written.
And indeed, “anyone with a computer” is almost everyone in the industrialized world. (I’m more “technically inclined” than most – I own two – three if you consider the one my company gives me to work on.) That may seem ridiculous – where would you keep them? – but computer technology has decreased the size of computers while making them much, much, more powerful.
I mean – looking at the IBM RAMAC 305 – which costs you guys about $160,000, weighs a ton, and takes up a large room. In 1958 dollars, my “work” computer cost $90, sits on my desk, and takes up about as much space as a 1958 RCA Deluxe television set. My home computers cost $155 – I spent more than most because, as I said, I’m technically inclined - and $400 for a portable model which runs for three hours off a single charge of a rechargeable battery, contains an integrated 17 inch display, and takes about the same space as stack of four Life magazines.
And yet, despite the size and relative cost of the computer, they really are much more powerful. Since you guys in 1958 invented the integrated circuit, generally, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. So, doing the math, our computers are 2^25 – or about 33.5 million times more powerful than yours. Approximately, of course.
What do we use the computer for? Well, mostly what you guys use them for, processing transactions and making rapid calculations in business, and creating models in scientific research.
It can be hard to explain all the things that a computer is used for –listening to music, watching television, both live and prerecorded, editing movies, playing games, writing letters, looking up research information, making phone calls, painting and illustrating, touching up photos – but the best way to describe the way the computer is used is that it is a device that allows us to model and mimic different things, and we use the models instead of the real thing because the models are often faster.
For example, I mentioned “touching up photos.” Well, we could film on photographic film – and many still do – but most of us have cameras that store a model of the photographic image into a small, integrated mini-computer in our cameras just for that purpose. Indeed, there is a camera sitting on my desk that is roughly the same size as a can of beans. It takes photographs as well as any camera on the market in 1958. (It can also record television picture and sound better than an entire studio, to media which is the size of a thumbprint and the thickness of a potato chip, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)
We then take the model of the image that the mini computer generates and transfer it to a model of a photographic lab, with many tools a professional photographer would use are emulated (and a few tools that simply couldn’t exist in reality!). We then alter our model of the photograph until we’re satisfied with the result, and then either print it out on paper – to get a “real” photograph from the model, or more likely, send it via the Internet to others on their computers.
Of course, we don’t think of it as “modeling the photography process” – to us, this is what photography is, and the model of the photograph is the photograph.
And yes, all of this is amazing, but none of these are as amazing as what happened when we started putting all of our computers together on the Internet. I’ve already told you that the processing power of one of our computers was about 33.5 million times greater than yours. And that most people in the industrialized world have a computer. Imagine the power that you’d get when each one of those computers can talk to each other.
Or better yet, I’ll tell you.
There is a massive store of information which is written, monitored, edited, fact-checked, and funded by volunteers. It is literally on any topic that is known to man, in much greater detail than you’d find in an encyclopedia.
If the database does not have an answer, or, more likely, that the answer that the database has simply is not enough information, you can use another tool to search the vast array of computers connected to the internet for the answer that you’re looking for. It searches among billions and billions of bits of computer data and returns results – usually within a second. And the information is portable – the entire print run of the New York Times can be digitized and fit onto a single disc the size of a saucer. (Though we mostly use these discs for watching movies and playing games.)
This is just a small part of what you can do with interconnected computers. I can call anywhere in the world on a videophone, and it costs me nothing to do so. A complete amateur has more ability to edit a film or TV show than Paramount Studios, and can publish it to potentially more people than watch I Love Lucy every week, within minutes.
My phone works anywhere on the planet, contains no wires, and is smaller than a deck of playing cards. It also has a “mini-computer,” and stores the numbers of all my friends and family, as well as takes messages for me when I’m away from the phone. It is considered obsolete - newer phones contain a full computer, including the ability to access the Internet I mentioned earlier. All without wires.
I mentioned that there is a war on. While most of our soldiers are in harm’s way, a few can attack via remote control from home. The morality of it is… complicated. Let’s talk about something more pleasant – human beings.
See, things aren’t all that different. Sure, my clothing is 70% cotton and 30% complex polymers which you haven’t invented yet, but it’s not a silver jumpsuit. My cheese may come from France, my wines from Australia, and my orange juice from India – but they’re still cheese, wines, and orange juice – I’m not taking food pills.
And people do change – for the better. For example, the President-Elect of the United States is black. Though Russia is still at odds with us from time to time, the real rivalry is economic, not militarily. Eastern Europe is independent, and there is no real threat of a mutually assured nuclear destruction.
There are counterexamples of how we haven’t changed – we now fear “sleeper cells” of Islamic terrorists instead of “communist spies,” there are still poverty, there is still injustice, there is still sickness, and there is still a distinction between parts of the world which are free and parts of the world which are not. It’s only been fifty years, after all, and human nature does not change quickly.
But I think, all in all, you have a lot to look forward to in the future. Here’s hoping that we do too.
Sincerely,
Humanity,
December 30, 2008.
by Brian Boyko
