I was on staff at Computerworld when it turned 25. That was in 1992; I interviewed Doug Engelbart and Andy Grove as part of the special issue we did to celebrate. Engelbart’s ideas on hyperlinking and other things were still a little out there, three years before the World Wide Web was invented (that’s why those links don’t lead to the interviews I did, since this pre-Web publication does not seem to be online). Moore’s Law was talked about but not a buzz phrase. I found Engelbart fascinating, but had trouble getting his ideas through to my editor. Grove was tough and pragmatic and driven, yet also humble.
It’s 20 years later and I just wrote this piece on Computerworld’s 45th birthday. It’s a bit amazing that there is still a print version of Computerworld; most of its rivals are no longer in print (though some remain online). In another 45 years, we should have hit the singularity, and if Ray Kurzweil is right, I’ll be able to write CW’s 90th anniversary edition (I’ll be a mere 93).
Computerworld will then be something we’ll read from nano-neural circuits we access via a process that will look much like meditation (we still won’t truly be able to multitask). But I’ll be contrarian and say that in a few years Moore’s Law will be stalled by physical limits, and our technical progress will dramatically slow. (No one will be able to find this comment in 45 years, of course.)
For now, here’s a little slice of Engelbart’s famous 1968 demo of something like personal computing:
Americans like youth. Driven by the unforgiving movie camera, we began to obsess about it in the 1920s, when ‘baby’ and ‘chick’ both became widespread as slang for a woman. The focus on youth pervaded novels like Tender Is the Night (1934) and Lolita (1955) [nod to Harvard’s Philip Fisher and his fabulous course The 20th Century American Novel].
It afflicts men, as well, especially over the last decade. In 2010, more than 1 million American men had some kind of plastic surgery option, quadruple the number in 2000.
So it was no surprise running into youthism while reporting a story on trends in technology. High tech prizes itself on merit but gives big bonus points for youth; some of that legitimately stems from how hard it is to keep up with exponential change (Moore’s Law puts Kuhn’s ‘normal science‘ on speed). Some of it is just plain bias; few of us can resist the culture’s preference for the young.
Since Silicon Valley prizes MIT and Stanford PhD-types between 20 and 25, I expected the executives I interviewed to say they looked to their younger staff for insights into where to go. Instead, they went way younger. Here are some sample comments:
There used to be a time when the general masses didn’t quite understand how computers work. Today a child is born and they know how to use a computer first, before they’re born. It almost seems that way. Your three-year-old kid can do things with your cellphone you can’t.
Kids demand things that are better and are first adopters, have a sense of ease in technology. That has an impact for us. We better be on that curve where kids and consumers are learning technology much faster and we need to make sure we adapt our products to reflect that.
Both that comment and the next show how much consumer expectations of technology are changing, and how quickly outmoded our tech platforms have become. Here’s a projection from that same curve:
The kids go to their computer and put their hand on the screen and try to move stuff around. That same thing is going to happen with voice. In one of the Star Trek movies Scotty is busy talking to the computer. And he says ‘why isn’t it responding?’ And they all look at him like he’s crazy. We’re at that moment.
There’s still so much potential think about how much easier technology can continue to make our lives over time. This ultra-connectedness will continue to be a challenge for people. Once people become digital natives like our kids are, you think about being overconnected. Things could be easier and our kids will definitely not go to libraries and not look up things like we did.
Another nod to tot tech:
I still remember how I had to translate in my mind what it meant to have a file that was a digital representation instead of a file that was a physical representation. Today the world is nothing but digital natives, that grew up deeply steeped in these technologies. I’ll steal Don Tapscott’s line in Growing Up Digital; he talked about how his father looked at the TV as technology and was always messing with the antenna and the clicker. We look right through the technology to the content. That’s what kids do today. Three-year-olds can swipe into a device and go to their games and play. That’s the fundamental effect of consumerization. There is no longer a different class that deals with technology.
Here’s the biggest reason why Silicon Valley shouldn’t be funding 25-year-olds:
The one that has me really, really astounded right now is my 11-year-old son has been playing Minecraft. I’ve gone down and sat in the man cave with him and listened to him online with his friends and watched the interaction of them building, because that’s all Minecraft is. Having 20 kids on at the same time working together to do that.
My oldest is 25.She started with IM. She still loves texting. She can’t understand why my son loves sitting down there and talking with his friends over Kinect. That’s just evolving so much.
This executive thinks his company might want to establish Minecraft-like collaboration group. But will non-tweens take to it?
Here is an example of Minecraft collaboration, involving my son and one of his friends:
Big data has buzz — I even saw a guy recently wearing a t-shirt saying “I like big data and I cannot lie.” But big data is also daunting. It evokes images of being crushed under the weight of information, like the knowledge workers in Alan Lightman’s Diagnosis.
So I found it refreshing to write this piece on big data turned into a field of flowers. The OECD’s Better Life Index takes a great deal of data and lets you decide what’s most important to you, depicted as a flower.
It’s the opposite of dumbing down the data — it makes it more meaningful. As designer Moritz Stefaner noted, large data sets about humans often lend themselves to natural visualizations.
The piece is for a new publication, Data Informed, which aims to demystify the volume of data that is now gathered, in part through looking at clever visualizations.
Some fun content went up this last full week of June. I curated this item on a Hindu pundit (yes, the real thing, though it’s pandit, in his vernacular) who has spent more than 20 years in Alberta, Canada. I find stories of people maintaining a spiritual practice in the face of massive materialism worth mulling.
In the wake of news that AIDS is growing in the rural South, we looked for attitudes and answers in two small Alabama towns.
We also advanced a story about a Russian official who wants the U.S. to shut down a Montana orphanage. Not every day a plucky startup gets a jump on the rest of the U.S. press.
My first freelance piece of the New Year, Why science is fragile (it’s in the Boston Globe Ideas section and may demand a subscription fee). I talked with Bob McCauley, a pioneer in the scientific study of religion, about his new book, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. It’s still hard for me to believe that science is in danger, but I do get that it is a cognitive challenge.
Despite my punny headline, you can’t eat anything at Visa’s biggest, most advanced data center. But if data about you matters to you, it’s worth a look inside the facility. I couldn’t write about everything I saw, and the company was circumspect about a lot of its information security procedures. Still, it was a feast for the eyes and the brain, walking through one of the modern economy’s centers, and seeing what it takes to keep it running smoothly. Visa argues that it is a technology company first and foremost; that story really isn’t about the data center but about the kinds of applications it develops. That will have to be another story.
Different remains divisive, or at least remarkable, even in East Coast Blue states like New Jersey. For mixed family, old racial tensions remain part of life shows that people who cross racial lines to marry will run into unpleasant remarks and stares, as well as teasing that is meant to be good-natured but can be awkward.
The accompanying slide show includes a powerful photo of the family walking down a New Jersey boardwalk enjoying the sun, while a man stares at them (the photo does lack clarity — one hopes that the picture was taken because the man is staring so openly, and the photographer snapped it. But it could be that he’s staring because a photographer is taking pictures of them). The diversity in this woman’s family came through wonderfully in the accompanying Web video.
Yet the worst episodes in the piece happened a generation ago, to the parents of the mixed-race mom in the story. And it notes that on contemporary college campuses and in cities, young people are far less likely to care. Honestly, the mom in the story has run into far more flak than my family has, either in California or here in Massachusetts. Not that we haven’t heard some things, from crass remarks and disbelief (one of our boys had blue-ish eyes as a baby) to curiosity. But in Millis I was able to write this piece on race, Seeing Family in Black and White. And now that we live in Cambridge, there is so much diversity in their school and at the bus stop and on the soccer field that I forget my kids are “different.” Different from what?
Even our church is multicultural, though church remains a place where Americans tend to separate. Weird, given how the Holy Spirit worked in Acts.
I hadn’t written about cloud computing since well before I was a Nieman Fellow, but little seems to have changed. In writing Can an Open Cloud Compete? I found that Amazon.com remains the dominant company in cloud computing, it’s still too hard for companies to switch from one cloud to another, and the cloud remains expensive and difficult to maintain. I’m not entirely sure how effective the cloud is either — much has been made of Zynga’s use of a ‘hybrid’ cloud strategy, where it starts its games on Amazon.com’s cloud, and when they’ve stopped experiencing exponential growth, it pulls them in house. But I’ve been playing Zynga’s Empires and Allies, and its performance is terrible. If it’s on Amazon’s cloud, Zynga isn’t getting the service it needs; if it’s on Zynga’s private cloud, Zynga should farm it back out to Amazon.
Yet there’s a stirring level of spirit amongst the people working on this open source cloud, OpenStack. Passion doesn’t fit into a technology-driven piece like mine, but conviction is the unspoken story here. The 600 or so developers who attended the OpenStack conference know about Linux, maybe worked on it, and they see the cloud emerging as the dominant form of technology innovation for at least the next few decades. The cloud will produce the next Bill Gates, the next Steve Jobs, the next Larry Ellison — and the next Linus Torvalds. Some of the people in attendance undoubtedly see themselves in one of those roles. Others were there because they feel like they’re part of something bigger than they are. Listen to Chris C. Kemp, whose keynote speech, OpenStack 2015, was the source of my story. Kemp told me that
every single company that sells software is reinventing itself as a service company. We’re seeing 25 years of software moving to a Web service — look at Microsoft Office. It doesn’t matter that there will be iPhone apps, mobile apps….the point is that the data is in the cloud and there are Web APIs behind them. Every software company is becoming a cloud company.
What is happening now is just a prelude. Here’s a comment from Jonathan Bryce, who co-founded RackSpace’s cloud:
This isn’t about 2015 for me. This is about 2050. This is what our economy and society is doing right now, going through this incredible shift where computing and data are in every single thing we do. Amazon will have a piece of it, but no way that anybody has it all locked up right now.
Who was the leader five years into the PC or mainframe or the automobile? There’s so much opportunity here. It’s such a massive shift, it will affect every company, every nation, every human…it’s way too early to declare winners. Amazon has done amazing things. They inspire us and push us on, but what the cloud is going to be in five years is very different from where it is today.
Heady stuff. I’ll be interested to see if this passion wanes over the next few years.
A telling example of how pervasive technology is in our culture comes from the use of social media at companies. Marketing departments set the tone for how the technology is used, and decide what to buy. Just a decade ago, technology choices were the province of the information technology department. IT comes in to social media discussions as an advisor, particularly in large companies where management challenges like picking a technology the company as a whole should use, instead of having each department pick its own. I wrote about why in Computerworld. My story, IT ratchets up social media involvement, explores some of the reasons why. An unspoken reason (because it’s now so obvious) is that much technology is finally so easy to use that most workers don’t need IT’s expertise to deploy it.
Feriha Peracha runs perhaps the world’s most unusual boarding school: it’s for 162 child warriors who fought for the Taliban in Pakistan.
More than 58 percent of the children, who range in age from 12 to 17, were abducted. But 41 percent volunteered to join the Taliban, some to get food. The rest were given over by their families.
All attend Sabaoon, which means the first ray of light at dawn. Her school is in an undisclosed location in the Pakistani province called Swat, about 150 miles west of Islamabad. Peracha presented some of her experience with these boys at a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship seminar called Beyond 9/11.
The school began in late 2007. Peracha, a psychologist whose program is funded primarily by UNICEF and protected by the Pakistani military, attempts to deradicalize them, and reintegrate them into Pakistani society.
It’s dangerous work – she carries it out despite last year’s assassination of a colleague, Mohammad Farooq Khan.
So far 32 of the 162 boys have graduated from Sabaoon and gone on to college or back to society. She says 95 percent of them will have been reintegrated into society by May 2012. A few of them will not be reintegrated into society. Her research shows that in Swat, what drives these children into extremism is not religious faith but poverty. She says for these children, Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs was not met, even the most basic physiological ones, food, water, warmth and rest.
Despite these life situations, about a third of the boys had complete high school. Another third had dropped out, while 35 percent took Koran lessons either at home or in mosques, where they would get a meal a day.
***
Listening to her talk about Pakistan’s poor reminds me of The Clash’s ‘public service announcement with guitars,’ Know Your Rights. The three are:
the right not to be killed,
the right to food money and
the right to free speech.
Though in The Clash song and apparently in Pakistan there are exceptions to these rights.