Starclouds

Dick Van Atta has invited me to give a guest lecture this evening to his graduate seminar on Emerging Technologies and Security at Georgetown University. The presentation, Next Generation Infotech, is basically a meditation on the nature of innovation, using examples from the history and future of computing. Since these are two topics I’ve been thinking a lot about, I thought I would share the presentation here. Some highlights:

• Innovation isn’t just about gadgets. It’s often about large-scale conceptual shifts. In the history of computing there have been several, the first two of which I write about at length in my book The Dream Machine.
  • The first, starting in the 1930s and 1940s, was the shift from “computer” as a job description-a person who sat at a desk crunching numbers with a mechanical adding machine-to “computer” as a fully automatic number-cruncher: a blazingly fast electronic device that could carry out complex calculations under the control of a program stored in its memory. This is the shift that gave us batch-processing mainframes, scientific supercomputers, and most recently, the highly distributed number-crunching power of “grid computing.” (I did a feature story about grid computing several years ago for Technology Review.)
  • A second shift, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, was the shift to “computer” as a tool of individual empowerment. This is the shift that gave us both the modern personal computer and the Internet.
  • A third shift is currently underway, powered by a combination of Moore’s Law and the proliferation of broadband and wireless networking.
• The Revolution Without a Name (Yet). There’s no general agreement yet about what to call this new concept. Pervasive computing? Cloud computing? Web 2.0? But we can list some of the main properties it will have:
  • Nomadic: Pitch Your Tent Anywhere
    • Mobile devices and mobile software
    • Seamless connectivity
      (cell, satellite, Wi-Fi…)
    • Ad hoc networks
  • Embedded: Electronic Nervous Systems
    • RFIDs, embedded processors, sensor nets…
  • Virtual: Distributed + Integrated
    • Grid, P2P, web services, federated DB
    • Collective processing (e.g., SETI@home)
    • “Holographic” data storage
  • Self-Managing: Coping with Complexity
    • Self-Configuring; Self-Optimizing; Self-Defending; Self-Healing
  • Open: Anyone Can Play
    • Deep history: free market, liberal democracy,
      open science
    • Internet: TCP/IP, HTTP…
    • Open-source software
    • Web 2.0: wikis, blogs, social networks, folksonomies, mashups, etc-the “architecture of participation”…
    • Tap creativity of whole population