After 40 years in tech, I see every innovation contains its dark opposite
- Reference: 1658300586
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/07/20/mark_pesce_40_years_in_tech/
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In 1982 the field was not yet very professional. Most people working as software engineers were, like myself, university dropouts.
I was very lucky to be mentored by two incredibly bright and (fortunately) very patient individuals. John taught me how to make the most of the tight microcode of the Intel 8085A, while Ethan – who had come from a background in minicomputers – showed me how to work with systems bigger than a single CPU and EEPROM.
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I learned everything they could teach me. Enough that when, a year later, my boss explained his Big New Idea, I was able to prototype it (both hardware and software) from his explanation. That turned out to be the very first version of [2]RSA's SecurID – progenitor of many of the 2FA systems in use today. (Full disclosure: I am not very good at cryptography and my first implementation was [3]laughably easy to crack . But it proved the concept.)
Humanity transitioned from a deficit of information to an exhausting oversupply
I spent the first decade of my career writing firmware for a range of communications devices: X.25 packet assembler/disassemblers, modems, CSU/DSUs, and, finally a range of dial-up networking equipment for a [4]startup called Shiva Corporation that allowed users to dial into an office network from anywhere to access files and printers.
Shiva followed with an IP gateway – at the time, only a few major universities and corporations had access to the internet – and I learned how to code for TCP/IP. That gave me my own Big New Idea – [5]inspired by William Gibson's Neuromancer – for a virtual reality interface to the internet.
The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too [6]READ MORE
As I worked on that, on the other side of the world, Tim Berners-Lee developed a protocol to connect all of the world's computers into a single, hyperlinked resource. The web changed everything (and continues to), providing the a foundation upon which I could build a 3D interface to the internet: that interface was [7]VRML .
The five years at the end of the 1990s felt like the tech equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion. The earliest crude websites quickly gave way to increasingly elegant user interfaces, data navigation, media explorers, e-commerce, and much more besides. As more and more information found its way into cyberspace, information became more accessible and sharable. In an instant, humanity transitioned from a deficit of information to an unending, exhausting oversupply.
We haven't yet learned how to hold smartphones at a safe distance
The Web 1.0 bubble burst in early 2000 – a reset wiping the board of almost every idea that couldn't be immediately monetized. The 3D web went to the Island of Lost Toys, never to be seen again – [8]or so I thought .
Then Friendster [9]made the web fun again ; the infinite depths of information became a space of human connection, as we found our friends, families, colleagues and neighbors, and used those bonds to share and learn from one another. Social media felt like another revolution – nothing would ever be the same between us.
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It turned out that was just the overture.
From the day Steve Jobs walked onstage in January 2007 with the first iPhone, only twelve years passed before half of the adults on Earth owned a smartphone. The ubiquitous devices bring all of our information and all of our connections to the palm of our hands. We no longer desire to look away from these screens – their flashing lights and continuous stream of notifications promise so much, while delivering a stream of FOMO, disappointment, and negativity.
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We haven't yet learned how to hold these devices at a safe distance – one that allows us to hold onto ourselves. To do that, we need time and space to think and feel. Technology helps us fill our time with such efficiency we rarely realize we need to breathe – just breathe – in order to grow.
[13]If you didn't store valuable data, ransomware would become impotent
[14]LIDAR in iPhones is not about better photos – it's about the future of low-cost augmented reality
[15]Zuck didn't invent the metaverse, but he's started a fight to control it
[16]The 3D Web has returned – rechristened as 'the Metaverse'. I doubt whether any of us are prepared for that moment when we don augmented reality 'spectacles' [17]soon to come from Apple and Meta and Microsoft, and the screen becomes the whole of the world – when everything we see gets mediated by the massive computing, analytics and recommendation infrastructure we've developed over the last forty years.
If we've learned anything over the last four decades, it's that every innovation, however wonderful, contains its own opposite. The splendor of "knowledge at your fingertips" laid the foundations for a planetary-scale "ignorance amplifier". Massive human hyperconnectivity across social networks reawakened and accelerated our tendency to form tribes. Our drawing together begins to look more like our coming apart. Advances in artificial intelligence mean that the surveillance state can scale without human staffing – or human oversight.
We never seem to grasp that our strengths inevitably transform into weaknesses. A touch of humility could go far to help us avoid tragedy as we navigate the next forty years. Where we can admit that we do not know, there we can find some space to think, to feel, and to breathe. ®
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[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YtfSRLpe8a9722bdY9-PRQAAAJg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2004/02/25/who_needs_passwords
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2012/06/27/smartcard_crypto_attack
[4] https://www.theregister.com/1999/10/05/chipzilla_takes_bite_of_net/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2001/05/25/viva_el_web/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/11/column_cyberbanana_windows/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/11/column_cyberbanana_windows/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2009/04/22/google_o3d_test_plugin/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2003/11/05/why_the_friendster_bubble_has/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YtfSRLpe8a9722bdY9-PRQAAAJg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YtfSRLpe8a9722bdY9-PRQAAAJg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YtfSRLpe8a9722bdY9-PRQAAAJg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/the_price_of_data/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/11/ipone_lidar_future_of_ar/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/11/the_metaverse_wars/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/29/zuckerberg_meta_facebook/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/11/ipone_lidar_future_of_ar/
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Agree, Agree ..... 1000 times agree !!!
"The splendor of "knowledge at your fingertips" laid the foundations for a planetary-scale "ignorance amplifier". "
Says it all very well .... the coming 'Metaverse' will ensure that all your senses are 'assaulted' simultaneously to ensure that there is no 'escape' !!!
I pity the next generation or two, who will exist in that world .... forced by peer-pressure to live in the 'Meta(stasis)verse' 24/7 !!!
Re: Agree, Agree ..... 1000 times agree !!!
We really need a sign at the entrance of the Metaverse - "Here Be Dragons"
Re: Agree, Agree ..... 1000 times agree !!!
Or maybe "Abandon all hope..."
Re: Agree, Agree ..... 1000 times agree !!!
Buy and Large your are correct!
signed Wall E
a planetary-scale "ignorance amplifier"
Got it in one.
The early vision of a system of all knowledge available at the click of a button has disappeared behind piles of bright flashing lights of toxic opinion and shouting and attention grabbers, anything to get me to watch another advert for a product I neither need, want, nor care about.
And I don't see a way out. When major websites and network activity is predicated *only* on 'this is a cool way to make lots of dosh' rather than 'Hmm, this is a neat idea, perhaps people might like to know about it; I'll post it up for free on my website', it's the only possible outcome. The best bits of the web are shy and self-effacing and hide under the mountains of social networking and 'one great hack to...'
At least with a public library you had to get off your arse and walk to it to get a book out.
Re: a planetary-scale "ignorance amplifier"
"At least with a public library you had to get off your arse and walk to it to get a book out."
True, but with my local library you still have to go online first because they've rearranged the fiction section so it's no longer just a massive set of shelves in alphabetical order. It's now sorted by subject (crime, sci-fi, etc.) so the enjoyment of browsing the shelves for Iain Banks and finding an interesting-looking book by a different author has gone for me. I discovered many of my favourite authors this way. It's also difficult to find many of the books I want because it's not obvious which section they are in. Now I just reserve online, walk in, pick up, check out and leave. Shame.
Re: a planetary-scale "ignorance amplifier"
I agree with you but why post AC?
Re: a planetary-scale "ignorance amplifier"
Yes, and bookshops have been the same way for years: it's all in genres. Which is fair enough, but when the science fiction section is full of bloody elves and magic, I tend to get peevish.
To be honest, I tend to find interesting books I would not normally search out on those tables of special offers and buy one get one half price.
Once again, convenience
Convenience will be the downfall of our civilization.
Pseudo-AI that tracks everything we look at in order to serve more of the same. Who thought that would be a good idea ?
The advertisers, of course.
I remember the days pre-VRML when you could hack the nintendo power-glove and hook it into a printer-port for VR on the screen. Blew my mind at the time.
3D BOXES!!!!!! THAT I CAN MOVE!!!!
Hopefully the metaverse goes the way of 2nd life. (also around 1/3rd of people get motion sick in VR, so there is the same issue as 3d tvs had in that you have just cut your potential audience by 1/3rd)
"Hopefully the metaverse goes the way of 2nd life."
I doubt we'll have much to worry about. There was a brief fad where RealEstate agents in these parts (Northern California) were playing up 3-D "tours" of their listings. Was quite the little cottage industry, making scans of properties for sale.
Only lasted a couple months. The buyers weren't even close to being interested in viewing property through goggles. Seems they universally wanted to see what they were buying in person. Good, old-fashioned boots on the ground.
What a bunch of luddites! (I actually heard an estate agent say that ... the mind boggles.)
As for the kids ... my Grand-daughter, age 11, wants no part of this kind of thing.
I doubt whether any of us are prepared for that moment when we don augmented reality 'spectacles'
Some people will be - the minority of people who bought into Google Glass before the realisation hit them that it wasn't enjoyable or useful in any significantly better way than getting information from a screen (either on a phone, tablet or monitor). Plus the large majority who took the piss out of them and called them "glassholes", because they'd realised this would be the case without having to buy and try the product first.
The fallacy that all it needs is better graphics and a bigger hype to make the idea catch on has arisen amongst those who ignored this basic lesson in their desperation to be pushing "the new thing", as easily proved by the stubborn non-adoption of the VR world by the general public. I think this is because many people are fully able to imagine what the user experience will be like, and conclude that it's not really going to be worth buying, as it doesn't offer much that they'd really want.
Bombarding the public with adverts featuring lots of happy smiling attractive young people pretending to be having a great time whilst having VR headsets strapped to their faces will, I suspect, be met with much more derision and piss-taking than those trying to push this idea expect.
Tie me down
> In 1982 the field was not yet very professional.
Oh, I don't know.
Some years before that, yours truly finished the university year and rocked up at my parents house that weekend.
On the monday I picked up the local (weekly) paper and looked casually through the Positions vacant section. There, in small print was a company just a bus ride away that was looking for FORTRAN programmers. "I could do that" (and even now I still write FORTRAN, but in several different languages) and gave them a call.
Having explained myself to the person who answered the phone, they said "Come over, we'll have a chat".
Now job interviews were pretty new to me. So I didn't change out of my ratty old jeans and faded T-shirt - after all, it was only a "chat", wasn't it! I got to their nice, clean offices with potted plants by the window. Indoor shrubbery - what an odd idea. While waiting, I watched someone enter the pass-code to their secure area and made the number and then got called in to see the man
Can you write FORTRAN he asked, which after my 2 years of 1 lecture a week I replied in the positive. I had done a couple of projects of which only one had locked up the university mainframe, so I though that was fair enough. The man started rattling on about Data General and Eclipses and credit scores and stuff. I nodded when it seemed opportune.
Eventually he stopped talking, wrote a name and an address on a piece of paper and handed it to me. "You start tomorrow, it pays £55 a week. Here's the name of the team leader (wassat?) and the customer's address. Just one more thing: could you wear a tie?"
I learned two things from that. The first that a nod's as good as a wink when you haven't a clue what someone is talking about. And second that wearing a tie gets you places. How much more professional can it get?
Re: Tie me down
Important things, ties. They restrict the flow of blood to the brain, and stop it getting too enthusiastic.
Re: Tie me down
".. I still write FORTRAN, but in several different languages."
I love that.
Re: Tie me down
"I love that."
Feel free to use it ... it's a meme that's been around since before the TCP/IP version of the Internet.
Re: Tie me down
Ever get a tie caught in a cooling fan or a line printer? There's a reason that ties were fair game for anyone with a pair of scissors at most early Silly Con Valley companies.
The only real use for a tie is as a handle when trying to shake sense into the wearer.
Friendster
I love that linked article about Friendster - they were simpler times in 2003.
VRML
I think it's fair to say that VRML was just a wee bit ahead of our available bandwidth and CPU. When they did catch up I really wish that the front end devs had picked it up again, rather than wanting a subset of OpenGL. But then I'm fussy about accepting code from just anyone.
Speech recognition...
I used to work (as a researcher) on speech recognition in the 90s - I thought it would be a brilliant innovation to bridge the human - machine interface, save time and give people the opportunity to better their life, yadda yadda...
In reality, if you make something easier for people (from a consumer perspective), they generally become lazier and sit on their backsides more and think less. I dont blame people, its a nature conserve energy thing, but is one thing that puts technology and humans at odds.