30 Years of Technology in Ireland
As Told by SureSkills CTO, Kevin Reid for TechPro's 30 year retro edition.
Easy, the internet and growth of information. In a little over 30 years the internet has gone from being the ultimate secret to being the ultimate public tool through which many people choose to live their lives. Beginning as a top secret research project to enable underground US nuclear sites to communicate with each other in the event that the Russians finally pressed the big red button, the internet today is not only a valuable business tool but it has also become a social requirement.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat and countless other social media tools are used by people to extend their social circles and share more of what’s happening in their lives. Over 12 billion messages sent daily by Facebook users alone, a huge explosion in information that the electronic world is facilitating.
While much of this is a positive thing, where do we draw the line on privacy issues? Or is this an issue? Is it a generational thing and the children of the internet see sharing as normal; privacy is not their default setting. What about the Internet of Things though?
By 2020 it’s anticipated that there will be 50 billion objects connected this way which will be fabulous for getting your lights and heating turned on just in time for your arrival home on a cold night. Your average family home already probably has upwards of seven-eight smart devices & smart phones are great but they constantly report where a person is. A smart burglar can drop a sensor outside a front door to learn about a person’s habits, build a pattern over what they do.
Ads based on preferences picked up by advertisers follow us across the internet; will they soon follow us up and down the street? And all the time the information pile increases.
Reports of the impending demise of Moore’s Law have been greatly exaggerated and the near future will probably see circuits on a microprocessor measured on an atomic scale with quantum computers, harnessing the power of atoms and molecules to perform processing and memory tasks, continuing to drive the incredibly fast growth in computing power. To put the growth of computing power into context, Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich explained that if a 1971 VW Beetle had advanced at the pace of Moore’s Law, today you “would be able to go with that car 300,000 miles per hour. You would get two million miles per gallon of gas, all for a mere cost of four cents.”
But while the amount of information we create, use and store grows exponentially, perhaps the threshold of our ability to use it intelligently is being neared.
All this data is stored and available to use but how will we locate it? How will we verify it? How will we differentiate it? How will information-providers commercialise it? International trade in the early days was a suck-it-and-see proposition; the trader would hope the price would be advantageous when the goods finally came back from a far-flung destination. Transatlantic cables started resolving this problem. An example of the desire for quick access to information was shown by a trader who had his Ethernet cables cut shorter to reduce latency. This shortened his waiting time by nano-seconds so it was utterly pointless but maybe it earned him a promotion.
I’ll leave you with IBM’s Watson, an AI super-computer. While it previously would have taken IBM’s team of lawyers around three months to analyse companies for potential merger and acquisition targets, Watson produced an accurate list of targets in just thirty minutes. The beauty of being able to access, verify and analyse huge quantities of information in super-quick time.
Watson was also victorious when tasked with challenging two ultimate champions on US TV show Jeopardy, a task it won with ease, One defeated contestant, Ken Jennings, afterwards offered an ominous remark: “Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of 'thinking' machines. 'Quiz show contestant' may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last.”
In 1985 nobody predicted with accuracy what 2015 would look like. All we know today is the next 30 years in this age of the internet and vast quantities of data will bring huge opportunity for information and technology to vastly improve our lives. Let’s hope we use it wisely.