For some time, there has been revolution underway made possible by surge in the computational power of information technology over the last few decades and by the ever-increasing availability and affordability of all kinds of computers which are depended upon by humans and connected in a truly vast global internetwork. No one [reading this paragraph] can credibly claim that they have escaped the real changes in their lives that have come about by that revolution ... whether people like it or not, the revolution that has come from internetworked computational power is the most important reality shaping human life.
It takes humans a good long while to understand how technology can re-shape their lives ... technology itself can evolve remarkably rapidly, but it is the practical, utilitarian use of technology in human lives which really drives the revolution.
In the 1960s, computational power was something that was done in gym-sized computer which used an automated punch-card reader for data entry ... then it was some weird science project for geeky adult nerds [with high salary jobs who could afford to buy expensive components] to play with in their basement ... then a HYPER expensive desktop computer which was still largely just a curiosity ... by the end of the 1980s, those of us who worked with data had email addresses and moved large amounts of data over the internet, although we still had to wrangle a lot of data from physical disks which we picked up from an office or maybe even received in the mail ... and THEN, finally CERN introduced the world to hyperlinked documents and Linus Torvalds hit the send button on a message to a newsgroup asking Minix hobbyists to take a look at his Linux project which was a roughish, but workable kluge of Unix and before all that long we AOL drink coasters, the hype of the dotcoms coupled with y2k made it CERTAIN that this information superhighway thing was fad.
But it kept coming ... and as billions of people started really depending upon connected devices to make their way in the world, the revolution was readily apparent ... it's not the technology per se, it's what BILLIONS of people who are serious about depending upon the technology, in pretty much every minute of their engaged lives, do as they transcend their geographic or physical lives and become, instead, defined by their most intense interests and pursuits in knowledge. Knowledge engineering has entire reshaped how we invent news materials and processes now. ... but that's only the start!
It's tough, probably impossible to know where things will go in the next fifty years ago ... but we should expect 1000-fold kinds of change in ten years ... even as what that change delivers to us becomes something that we take for granted and imagine was just obviously going to happen. Those who doubt the coming 1000-fold kinds of change that will happen in the next decade should reflect upon the last 50 years ... roughly one half-century ago, the ideas, designs and architecture behind what would become the internet was already reasonably well developed by engineers and researchers working in the information technology realm. It took a few years for the technological "secrets" of microprocessors, storage and memory to leak out and be covered by early reporters writing for geeky magazines ...the early hobbyists started developing the computational platforms which nobody understood but would evolve into desktop PCs, but information technology was still a curiosity ... the industry titans who sold large computer systems to governments and research institutions were not only skeptical that consumers really needed a computer in the home, they were also not particularly interested in selling systems to relatively large small businesses. Forty years ago, the conventional wisdom on computers was that the technology was an expensive fad ... maybe something for the military or the social security administration.
And yet, in the early 80s, retail outlets actually began opening ... so that consumers could buy highly unreliable gear from someone who could service the danged the junk. Early adapters of personals computers thousands of dollars for extremely EXPENSIVE devices [more than many families earned in 2-3 months] for a device that had only a nebulous futuristic, quasi-defined purposes, ie, as educational curiosities "for the kids, since computers are the future", my wife might use it "to organize her recipes" or other database purposes which did not really make any sense from a cost-savings sense, to maybe help keep betters records for taxes [evidently because it's tough to organize a shoebox of receipts and some people really enjoy recreational recordkeeping]. In comparison to the ridiculous expense of early desktop computers, a modern smartphone is typically not much more than a minimum wage employee earns in one week ... the amount spent on "a toy" or device with some ill-defined purpose was at least an order or two in magnitude more than a smartphone [which has become an absolute necessity for many].
For some time, there has been revolution underway made possible by surge in the computational power of information technology over the last few decades and by the ever-increasing availability and affordability of all kinds of computers which are depended upon by humans and connected in a truly vast global internetwork. No one [reading this paragraph] can credibly claim that they have escaped the real changes in their lives that have come about by that revolution ... whether people like it or not, the revolution that has come from internetworked computational power is the most important reality shaping human life.
It takes humans a good long while to understand how technology can re-shape their lives ... technology itself can evolve remarkably rapidly, but it is the practical, utilitarian use of technology in human lives which really drives the revolution.
In the 1960s, computational power was something that was done in gym-sized computer which used an automated punch-card reader for data entry ... then it was some weird science project for geeky adult nerds [with high salary jobs who could afford to buy expensive components] to play with in their basement ... then a HYPER expensive desktop computer which was still largely just a curiosity ... by the end of the 1980s, those of us who worked with data had email addresses and moved large amounts of data over the internet, although we still had to wrangle a lot of data from physical disks which we picked up from an office or maybe even received in the mail ... and THEN, finally CERN introduced the world to hyperlinked documents and Linus Torvalds hit the send button on a message to a newsgroup asking Minix hobbyists to take a look at his Linux project which was a roughish, but workable kluge of Unix and before all that long we AOL drink coasters, the hype of the dotcoms coupled with y2k made it CERTAIN that this information superhighway thing was fad.
But it kept coming ... and as billions of people started really depending upon connected devices to make their way in the world, the revolution was readily apparent ... it's not the technology per se, it's what BILLIONS of people who are serious about depending upon the technology, in pretty much every minute of their engaged lives, do as they transcend their geographic or physical lives and become, instead, defined by their most intense interests and pursuits in knowledge. Knowledge engineering has entire reshaped how we invent news materials and processes now. ... but that's only the start!
It's tough, probably impossible to know where things will go in the next fifty years ago ... but we should expect 1000-fold kinds of change in ten years ... even as what that change delivers to us becomes something that we take for granted and imagine was just obviously going to happen. Those who doubt the coming 1000-fold kinds of change that will happen in the next decade should reflect upon the last 50 years ... roughly one half-century ago, the ideas, designs and architecture behind what would become the internet was already reasonably well developed by engineers and researchers working in the information technology realm. It took a few years for the technological "secrets" of microprocessors, storage and memory to leak out and be covered by early reporters writing for geeky magazines ...the early hobbyists started developing the computational platforms which nobody understood but would evolve into desktop PCs, but information technology was still a curiosity ... the industry titans who sold large computer systems to governments and research institutions were not only skeptical that consumers really needed a computer in the home, they were also not particularly interested in selling systems to relatively large small businesses. Forty years ago, the conventional wisdom on computers was that the technology was an expensive fad ... maybe something for the military or the social security administration.
And yet, in the early 80s, retail outlets actually began opening ... so that consumers could buy highly unreliable gear from someone who could service the danged the junk. Early adapters of personals computers thousands of dollars for extremely EXPENSIVE devices [more than many families earned in 2-3 months] for a device that had only a nebulous futuristic, quasi-defined purposes, ie, as educational curiosities "for the kids, since computers are the future", my wife might use it "to organize her recipes" or other database purposes which did not really make any sense from a cost-savings sense, to maybe help keep betters records for taxes [evidently because it's tough to organize a shoebox of receipts and some people really enjoy recreational recordkeeping]. In comparison to the ridiculous expense of early desktop computers, a modern smartphone is typically not much more than a minimum wage employee earns in one week ... the amount spent on "a toy" or device with some ill-defined purpose was at least an order or two in magnitude more than a smartphone [which has become an absolute necessity for many].