The other day Cathy asked me what a semi-conductor is. It takes courage to ask me an open-ended question, because you risk getting the full answer. We started with integrated circuits, which is what most people mean when that say “semi-conductor,” then got into the conductive properties of metals and minerals, slid from there to quantum physics and electron tunneling, jumping to the idea of electronic gates, which leads back to Boolean algebra, all of which briefly encapsulates the idea of contemporary computer science.
But: The role of semi-conductors in all this is relatively recent, so we talked about Pascal’s automated looms, Babbage’s Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace’s invention of software engineering, Turing’s Enigma and the idea of the Turing machine — which, despite all the hype you read, is the underlying engineering for the computer in front of you right now, scaled up a bazillion times.
The Turing machine was mechanical. The role of semi-conductors in data processing came even later than that. So: We talked about integrated circuits, about Moore’s Law and most importantly about the information explosion, the practical corollary of Moore’s Law. We continued with the idea of the Semantic Web, the notion that, very soon, instead of you trying to find the data you want, the data you want will avidly be trying to find you.
There’s more: We talked about multi-core computer processors and their implications, particularly about their application in compute-intensive functions. As a matter of physics, there is a finite limit to Moore’s Law. Heat is a significant problem right now, but even postulating computers running immersed in liquid nitrogen, data moves at the speed of light. At some point, no matter how close together chip-makers manage to plant circuits, propagation delay will limit further speed increases.
But this is where massively-parallel multi-core processors come into their own. Imagine not two cores, or four, or eight — the most you can buy in a computer store right now. Imagine 64 cores, or 256, or 1,024 microprocessors running side-by-side, splitting jobs up into 1,024 separate tasks and performing all of them simultaneously.
There’s even more at the outer edges of theory, but it doesn’t matter. We are on the verge of any number of singularities — points beyond which cogent prediction is impossible — but the one we are certain to encounter is the singularity we are racing toward in data-processing.
We are awash in a deluge of information — and we are rapidly acquiring the capacity to apprehend it all. Not “we” as a species. “We” as individuals. There will be a time in the not very distant future when each one of us will own enough “personal” computing power to acquire, synthesize and act upon any body of information we might want to comprehend.
This is for real. This is not flying cars or perpetual motion machines. Computers may never catch up with our ability to find new uses for them, but all of the embodied information of the past — say, the world before 1995 — will not even be a snack to the computer you will own in a few years.
I cite all that to get to this quote from a very long article in The New Yorker:
Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War documents on Valley of the Shadow. But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.
At first face, this is just plain ignorance. There are many things you cannot find on your laptop right now, but there are millions more you can’t find anywhere else. It is the triumphalist cry of form over substance, an obvious error. It is Ludditism, of course, the kind we have come to expect from the printed media. It is the kind of effete snobbery we expect from The New Yorker, the logical fallacy known as No True Scotsman: No true intellectual does research except from within a cloud of dust mites and mold spores. And it is a treacly romanticism, a reiteration of the sappy assertion that has driven the idea of literature in The New Yorker (and literature emanating from New York) since the Roaring Twenties: My adolescence is the only adolescence. It is all of these things and more.
But what it is, mostly, is uninformed.
Everything the author hates and fears is almost here. Not in fifty years but perhaps in as few as five. Even now, you can easily store the digital equivalent of The New York Public Library on a suitably-equipped desktop computer. The ability to synthesize all that data will require better tools, but those tools are coming along apace. I would dearly love to have a direct interface between my brain and the nets — imagine setting up a huge problem and just letting it chug away on a multi-core computer running as a peripheral to your mind! — but we don’t need any miracles of integration between silicon and wet-ware to foresee that each one of us will soon have the power — not necessarily to say the wit — to comprehend whatever we like, from English literature to particle physics to heart surgery, in its entirety.
And whether that frightens you or thrills you to the core or simply leaves you indifferent, it is upon us. It will happen.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, technology
ian says:
Wow, I can’t tell whether you’re being intentionally obtuse. The point of the New Yorker article’s author seems to be that there is information available in some books beyond that which is found in the analysis of the words. Namely, he asserts that hand-written notes made in certain volumes; the make-up and condition of the covers, spine, and binding; and substances present in the physical book can all contribute information related to the linguistic content of the book.
Much of what you write in your blog seems well thought out and logical, but here it sounds somewhat to me as if you have an existing round-hole belief about the intrinsic biases held by the “luddite” MSM, and are trying to force a square-peg piece of evidence into it.
I hope you don’t take this comment as an attack, since that’s not my intention; if I thought you were just some blowhard, I wouldn’t bother commenting. I’m genuinely interested your response.
Thanks…
November 1, 2007 — 9:56 am
Greg Swann says:
> Namely, he asserts that hand-written notes made in certain volumes; the make-up and condition of the covers, spine, and binding; and substances present in the physical book can all contribute information related to the linguistic content of the book.
Not meaning to be offensive in return, but this is entrail reading. It means nothing — to me at least — with respect to the actual data. A printed train schedule is not different in content from the one you find on-line — except it is much more likely to be out of date or otherwise in error. I read the entire article as the author trying to invent reasons to defend his antiquarian biases against the onslaught of progress. The argument is not new to me.
> but here it sounds somewhat to me as if you have an existing round-hole belief about the intrinsic biases held by the “luddite” MSM, and are trying to force a square-peg piece of evidence into it.
That’s possible. Much of what I read in print today strikes me as rear-guard defenses of obsolete technologies. In that respect, I was just using the New Yorker article as an example of the breed — while talking about everything in information technology that really matters, which is to say everything the author of the piece either chooses or affects to ignore.
November 1, 2007 — 10:16 am
Matt Carter says:
I was intrigued by this article as well, although I think it was more than another rear-guard defense of obsolete technologies. It’s a warning about the need to preserve the original works (and access to them) as we move to a digital world — not a warning against moving forward with the inevitable.
In the past, libraries destroyed a bunch of original printed media (books, newspapers, etc.) after it was microfilmed, and now microfilm is turning out to be an unstable medium.
There are similar worries that it’s simply not possible to digitize everything, and that the things we do digitize may be more vulnerable to loss — or less accessible to the masses — than all of us who recognize the value of a universal (digital) library might like to think.
Here’s the nutgraf from the story:
“The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating. Over time, as more of this material emerges from copyright protection, we’ll be able to learn things about our culture that we could never have known previously. Soon, the present will become overwhelmingly accessible, but a great deal of older material may never coalesce into a single database. Neither Google nor anyone else will fuse the proprietary databases of early books and the local systems created by individual archives into one accessible store of information. Though the distant past will be more available, in a technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our collective attention.”
Nicholson Baker has been writing about this issue for many years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold
November 1, 2007 — 6:15 pm
Dave Barnes says:
It is spelled semiconductor. No hyphen.
November 1, 2007 — 7:16 pm