Monday, June 28, 2010

Next Came Automation

By the mid to late 1960's the usage of computer systems in automating business record keeping processes was well underway. Although the machines were still called computers, most people had forgotten about the role of the computer as a computer and thought about it as a data processing machine. At the time, the term of choice for what computers were doing was data processing. In fact, one of the premium professional organizations was called The Data Processing Management Association. And many corporate departments who were responsible for these activities had the term Data Processing figuring prominently in their name.

Over the two decades from the mid 1960's to the mid 1980's most corporate jobs changed substantially as work that had previously been done by people was picked up by the computer in automated data processing systems. And people, who had, themselves, been the data processing system were now users of the automated data processing system.

Early computer systems were often justified on the basis of the number of jobs they replaced in the cost benefit analysis. "If we automate this process, we can get rid of twenty clerical positions." would be a typical claim. Although, as I remember from the time, it is unclear that any jobs were every really lost.The notion of automation required that jobs be lost to justify it. However, the real reason why these systems were being built was that everybody else was building them. And if you didn't keep up you would surely fall behind.

We can make two observations about the relationship between computation and automation that will help us extend this model later. First, computation gave rise to automation although that extension is not at all obvious. One would not look at a computer systems and automatically see an automation system. Second, the increased usage of the computer for automation gave rise to a greater demand for computation. This is, the world demand for computers turn out to be far more than five because data processing dramatically increased the demand for computers.

Monday, June 21, 2010

In the Beginning there was Computation

There is an apocryphal quote attributed to Thomas Watson the head of IBM at the time the computer was invented. As the story goes, when asked about the size of the world market for computers, he replied "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". Although there is little evidence that he actually said this, the story has taken on the status of urban legend and is also revealing of our understanding of computers at the time.

The computer was not really invented in the 1940's, it was resurrected. Charles Babbage did the foundation work in the early 1800's attempting to develop a machine that could compute the roots of polynomials. That notion of a computational machine stuck in the very name of the device that we still, to this very day, call a computer. Early computers were not seen, as they would be later, as information processing machines. They were seen as computational machines. Hence the name and the misunderstanding of the market implied by the apocryphal quote. If the computer had remained a mega calculator there may very well have been a very limited market for it.

Fortunately, some of the engineers at IBM, at the time, had a little imagination and could see beyond the basic computational capabilities. I can imagine that this caused no end of internal conflict at IBM as their cash cow, at the time, was the Electronic Accounting Machine which processed information on paper cards. Suggesting that the computer be used for this purpose was not only a suggestion that they replace their entire business with a new mode of processing, but it also suggested that information be encoded, not on cards which you can see, but in bits of electricity that you cannot see. So, although this seems obvious in hindsight, it was quite a leap of imagination at the time.

By the late 1960's the use of computers in automating business record keeping systems was in full swing. In fact, computation was, at this point, a fairly minor use of computer power. The computer resources used, for example, to compute your pay check are minor compared to the processing necessary to get the information ready for the computation and producing the paycheck once the computation is completed. If the name of these machines was updated along with their function, they would have been called automaters rather than computers. But, that did not seem very important at the time. So the old name stuck.

The point that I would like to close this piece with is - the computational power of computers led to the use of computers for automation. And this theme of computer usage leading to greater usages will be expanded upon in subsequent posts.

Monday, June 14, 2010

How Long Will The Information Age Last?

Alvin Toffler published a book in 1980, called The Third Wave, which caught the attention of the mass market as well as numerous academics. In this book, he attempted to explain the turmoil we were experiencing in the 1960's and 1970's as the third wave of change for human civilization. More specifically, he saw the evolution of human civilization as undergoing three major transformative revolutions. The first was the agricultural revolution. The second was the industrial revolution. And the third (the third wave) was a transition to a post industrial society. This post industrial society has become known as the Information Age.

I am neither a staunch supporter nor a staunch critic of Toffler's characterization. On the positive side, he provides a thought provoking characterization of the evolution of civilization. It is easy to understand and it got a lot of people thinking about what was going on. On the down side it is one of many, many possible characterizations and I always have a bit of trouble when authors include the present in their historical perspectives. That said, he did popularize, although not coin, the term Information Age.

I think that most people tend to accept the fact, free of critical reflection, that we are in the Information Age. It is not clear to me that this is true. But if it is, we can ask how long will the information age last and what will come next?

The agrarian age lasted thousands of years while the industrial age lasts only hundreds. If progress is speeding up and we can draw on the patterns of the previous ages, then the information age should last only decades. If this is the case, then something new ought to be coming along very shortly. What is it?

I don't want to fall into the same trap that I just criticized Toffler for and provide a historical perspective that includes the present and the near future. I do think, however, we can look at patterns from the past to the present and provide reasonable speculations on what might be coming next. Over the next few posts I am going to look at the evolution of computer applications from the automation of the 1960's to the social interaction technologies of 2010 and see if we can find any useful patterns.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Global Warming as Apocalyptic Thinking

It is a good thing that not many people read my blog or I would set off a fire storm with this next claim. However, I believe, that the current obsession with global warming is yet another example of apocalyptic thinking. Bear with me as I make my case.

First, let me say that I agree philosophically with much of what the global warming movement is concerned about. We are wasteful of our resources. We are overly dependent on fossil fuels. We should learn to live in harmony with our environment. We are living a technologically subsidized unsustainable live style.

The problem is that these are philosophical, perhaps even spiritual beliefs. When people try to make them scientific claims, in support of their beliefs, I have a problem with that. It is like saying 96% of all atheists go to hell. Therefore you should be a Christian. Or in a more realistic vein, one might claim that religious people live 14% longer than non religious people. There are lots of good reasons why one might choose to be a Christian. But, statistics about atheists are not among them.

Using scientific data to shore up philosophical beliefs is always problematic. Don't forget that 'scientific' data was used to prove racial inferiority in the 19th century. So, I am always concerned about the barrage of 'scientific' data used to support the global warming belief system. Why? I believe that underlying this movement is subconscious vein of apocalyptic thinking. Following the subtext model from the previous post consider this subtext of global warming:

1) We have gotten off track. We have sinned. We had allowed our greed to consume us. Our consumption is our of control. We have failed to show respect for things greater than ourselves. We have engaged in the sin of hubris thinking we are greater than we are.

2) Things will be set right by forces beyond our control: We must pay for our sins. We will suffer. We will be punished. The earth will strike back at us and we will be exiled, once again from Eden. Glaciers will melt. Seas will rise. Populations will die. Fertile farm lands will become dessert.

I don't mean to suggest that there is not a problem we should be concerned with. We have way more people on the planet than we can sustain without substantial technological leverage. If it weren't for technological advances of the past couple centuries, Malthusian cycles would have kicked in. But technological subsidies are not limitless and the Malthusian cycles will kick in at some point. Fuel efficient cars and alternative energies may buy us a little time but they do not solve the problem.

If we were serious about solving the problem we would be talking about population control rather than whipping ourselves up into an apocalyptic religious frenzy that avoids the real problem.

Well, for those of you who do read this blog and are fed up with my ranting about apocalyptic thinking, you will be happy to know that in the next post I will move on. Thanks for your patience.