Your Humble Blogger just read Charlie Stross’s essay on Shaping the Future, which has some things in it that are quite interesting and provoking. In a general sort of way, I think he makes the mistake that people tend to do with futurism, which is that even if the three strands that you predict come with, say, 80% confidence (which is a lot), the chances of all three coming true are around fifty-fifty. So when Mr. Stross looks at the combination of advances in computing power, storage and mobile phone distribution, he comes up with some startling extrapolations. But they ain’t necessarily so. And, of course, as he says, he is leaving out some major strands (global warming, bioengineering, etc) and assuming no major breakthroughs (real AI, real nanotech, etc), and at least some of that stuff will have a substantial impact on the stuff he is dealing with. Still, it’s a fun essay.
The thing that struck me, though, and as usual YHB is distracted by a minor point, was his reference to the telephone:
Traditional fixed land-lines connect places, not people; you dial a number and it puts you through to a room in a building somewhere, and you hope the person you want to talk to is there. Mobile phones in contrast connect people, not places. You don't necessarily know where the person at the other end of the line is, what room in which building they're in, but you know who they are.
So, what I was wondering—when people wired up the cities and towns, a hundred years ago or less, did they think Well, that’s it, then. That’s permanent. That’s a room that will always have a telephone. I’m particularly imagining the smallish towns where there was one telephone first, probably in the store/post, and then a few in some important businesses such as banks and whatnot, and then a few in the rich men’s houses, and then a few more in business, and so on. And I wonder, when they were put in, whether anybody thought well, that’s a good solution for a few generations, and after that, there’ll be something new. I doubt it.
I’m inclined, perhaps only because I am tired and a trifle cranky, to make pronouncements about Human Nature, and say that People are Like That. Nobody builds a house and thinks that’ll be nice, until the people want something different. If I opened a business, say a bookstore or a restaurant, I doubt I would think this is a business that will last for thirty years. I would imagine it there forever, even knowing that the street corner hasn’t been there forever, that there’s no reason to believe that it will be there forever, that there will be streets in a hundred years, or restaurants, or bookstores.
Recently, Howard Kurtz wrote a Washington Post column headed Interviews, Going the Way of the Linotype? The first sentence? “The humble interview, the linchpin of journalism for centuries, is under assault.” Centuries? There hasn’t even been journalism for centuries. Andrew Cline writes that “We have to get into the late 1910s before interviewing becomes anything like what we understand it to be today.” Less than a hundred years. The interview, less than a hundred years old. Think of that. And it doesn’t have to last.
Every now and then I ask people, Gentle Readers or other acquaintances, whether they think that the United States Constitution will be essentially the same for another fifty or a hundred years, meaning to ask, do you think our federal and local legislatures, executives and judiciaries be on the whole chosen the same way they are now. Most people seem to think they will be, with some (to my mind) small changes likely. I don’t know.
But I’ll say this for a cliché: life is change. One reason people fight so hard against the global warming suggestions is that they mean a substantial dislocation in the next generation. But there is always a substantial dislocation, in every generation. The trick isn’t to prepare for what happens, it’s to prepare for whatever happens. Perhaps the thing to do is to say, when we make our big plans, our universal health care or our blogger code of ethics, our biodiesel or our mobile telephony, to be able to say well, that’s a good solution for a couple of generations, and after that, there’ll be something new.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I’d say that, at least in some areas, we’re getting better at this because the changes are happening so fast that we can still remember the last change and how it seemed permanent. How long ago was it that 100 megabytes of memory on a computer seemed unfillably huge? Within my adult life, certainly (I’m 36). Now I have half-a-gig on my keychain, and I got it free for attending a conference. So I’m inoculated, I would hope, against ever thinking “well, if I spring for the petabyte version, that’s all the storage I could ever need!”.
There’s an Internet story (which apparently Gates denies) that says Bill Gates once said “People will never need more than [x amount]K of memory.” Even if that’s not true, the dude who sold me a computer one time was trying to talk me into buying a less expensive machine (what? why? you’re selling me a computer, dummy!), because a 133MHz Pentium was more than I would ever need. I think he was trying to talk me into 66MHz, but I could be making that up…
peace
Matt
Great entry, and I’d love to write a long response, but I gotta run. But I do want to say a couple of very brief things:
1. Yeah–like many people, I tend to assume that any given thing (perhaps except for things like storage space and processing power, as Jacob noted) has always been the way it is, and will always be the way it is. I’m often astonished to learn that something that seems like it’s been around forever is actually quite new. (I was shocked to discover that it was illegal for unmarried people to buy birth control in some states forty years ago.)
2. On the other hand, some things really don’t change all that quickly. Despite all sorts of wacky variations and advances, most chairs and tables in the Western world are basically the same as what they’ve been for hundreds of years.
3. I sorta feel like if you’re building a plan for the way things are going to be, it’s often a good idea to assume that it’s the way things will be forever after the plan goes into effect. In practice, you can be pretty certain that won’t be true. But if you build your plan with the expectation that something better will come along soon, then you can afford to be cheap and slipshod and haphazard, figuring that it doesn’t really matter because your system won’t last long anyway.
4. So what I think I’d recommend rather than thinking “well, that’s a good solution for a couple of generations” is thinking “how can we build this system in such a way that it’ll adapt to whatever changes come along?” This is, in essence, what the US Constitution does; not that it’ll necessarily still be around in a hundred years, but the fact that it’s lasted over 200 years already suggests that it was a pretty flexible framework.
Okay, gotta run.
Briefly, to expand on Jed’s #3: the expectation that something better will come along soon is precisely the bane of the IT world. To me, the Big Tease of the essay you link is that Stross touched very briefly upon and then set aside the complete overhaul of the computing industry and information services from current practices when we can no longer expect the processing power per unit of constraint (size, cost, heat, etc.) to increase at a roughly-constant exponential rate. Of course, by the time that happens, enough else may have changed that it’s too difficult to say what that industry will be changing from, much less too. Still, I saw that sigmoid there and had high hopes that he’d talk about what happens to a culture and an economy as it transitions from the slope of any particular sigmoid to the plateau. ‘Cuz I dunno, an’ I wanna.
early interview
REPORTER: can you explain to our audience a little of your thinking behind the new tax structure?
QUEEN: [to someone off camera] kill him.
things coming and going
there’s that list of dead technologies, to make a point about the generation gap. “people graduating from college now have never used a rotary phone,” stuff like that.
i don’t have a cell phone. the part of the reason that isn’t “i don’t like phones”, is, the iphone is the first mobile that strikes me as being user-oriented — and this comes from someone who’s a longtime PDA user, for whom a smartphone would have been useful.
there are some things that are easy to predict:
* many tools succeed not at what they do, but at how well they fit people’s schedules and plans
* many users will live with, even defend, crappy tools, on the basis that they require a fashionable skill to operate
* tools will eventually gain real utility, regardless.
planning
i’ve always* felt that you do the best you can with what you know. for years i was upset that we’d lain multiple redundant competitive transoceanic cables for net traffic, costing billions, instead of building a fiber-everywhere network we could have when we were flush with dotcash. it was a remarkably short-sighted non-decision made because collective choice was out of fashion at the time. instead of planning, people played railroad tycoon. [applause]
however. certain things are very expensive and very hard to change. buildings, for instance, where’s that number, it’s something like 80% of current stock will be in use in 2050. like it or not.
so rather than trying to cut costs or assume that things are going to shift, it speaks to a need for planners to make their decisions based on how much future change would cost per person.
for instance, replacing every telephone with a cell phone is a network change and equipment change requiring a fraction of a month’s pay, while getting today’s larger-per-person homes to meet future energy usage marks with will have to be creatively financed.
“because we can” projects should be public in nature, to keep the initial and ongoing costs low — one crazy-ass public building instead of fifty mcmansions.
—
*hehe
This isn’t quite the same thing, but Amy and I were struck, in Peru, by the time scale of the Inca building projects. These people started building things that wouldn’t even be finished within their lifetimes. Not just the peon builder types, but the architects and kings who set the work in motion, they did so knowing that they’d never see the end result. We don’t do that kind of thing any more.
…except on the rare occasion when we do, and then it’s just crazily awesome, even when it’s totally, well, crazy, like the Crazy Horse Memorial.
Note that at least some of the European cathedrals were also on that kind of time scale.
That’s what almost any really large construction project looks like in a low-energy economy.
When energy is both the biggest cost and the limiting factor in the rate of construction (because most of it must come from human labor), the only way to get a large project done is with good long-term planning and an investment in materials that will be very durable.
We build cheap and sloppy because energy is, by historical standards, incredibly cheap in comparison to materials and human labor, so materials are the biggest cost. In this economy, it’s cost-efficient to build quickly (cutting labor costs) with flimsy materials (cutting materials costs) and shoddy designs (cutting labor costs), and then build again in twenty years, because (cheap materials + cheap designs + minimum human labor) * 2
Now, if the environmental impact of greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental degradation associated with the cheap energy economy were actually being expensed, the equation would change dramatically. But we will all be paying those deferred expenses in the coming decades, sadly.
I’ll also point out that because of engineering and power, there is very little that would take generations to build, if we wanted to build it. If we wanted to, say, build a continental high-speed transit system (maglev freight!), it would take—what—forty years? Less? The Washington National Cathedral took eighty-three years from foundation stone to capstone, but the delays were, you know, delays, rather than engineering problems. I don’t know what our generation would want to build that would take longer than a generation to complete.
Unless we were deliberately trying to do it using limited power or materials or whatnot. Which might be a good idea, for some things, but is a different concept.
Thanks,
-V.
Things that are taking longer than a generation to build:
1. The Silver Line of the MBTA.
2. A spam-free Internet.
3. A comprehensive national health care system.
4. A World Trade Center memorial.
5. Pax Americana.
We still set out individually and collectively to build things that we won’t live to see completed. We plant trees that will take 100 years to grow to maturity. We raise children who will outlive us. We develop religious practices that we hope will continue to evolve for many generations. Long-term thinking has not vanished.
Today, most individual large building projects take less than a decade to plan, and then less than a decade to build. But when the currently-planned rebuilding of Lincoln Center is done in 15 years, how long will it have taken to build Lincoln Center? How do we count the timeline, and how do we consolidate the intent and the building stages? Distance (whether in time or space) changes our answers, as details important in the present fade into irrelevance in the past.