Technology Time Out

Time Out
Nat Torkington
nathan@torkington.com

Tuesday, 20 September 2011

Hi folks, I’m honoured to be asked to speak to you all as you kick off
your hackathon. I’m also, I have to say, rather intimidated: I have an
hour. An HOUR! I’m reasonably conﬁdent that there’s no topic upon
which I need an hour to say all that I know or, more importantly, all that
you want to hear.

Parental Advisory:
Contains Strong Language

The Message


But there is something that I do want to tell you, and I’ll use however
much of this time I need to get my point across. And that is,

You will make the 21C better.


I don’t know if you remember the ads for BASF. They were a German
chemical company, and when they advertised they talked about a whole
pile of things and said “we don’t make the things you use, we make
them better.” I think that everyone in this room has the spirit of BASF.
You won’t make the 21st century, but you’ll make it better.


I’m sure you’re all ‘no wait, hold up dude, whatever you’re selling, I
don’t want it.’
I’m not selling anything, I don’t have a god I want to talk to you about,
and I can’t make anyone’s penis larger in ways that I want to talk about
on stage. Let me explain what I mean by “you will make the 21st
century better” ...


The 21st century is the Information Age. Every website, book, and
magazine tells us so. What does this MEAN, this “Information Age”?

Stone
Bronze
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Industrial
Information


Historians like to look at, well, history. And they can spot a couple of
clear divisions in human society. It turns out that the technology we
have changes the society we live in.

Stone
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Industrial
Information


When you’re banging sharp edges onto rocks to cut down trees, there’s
a limit to the size and complexity of the society you can build. Despite
that, historians say the Stone Age rocks. Well, their bumper stickers say
that. Anyway.

Stone
Bronze
Iron
Industrial
Information


When you start to use metal, then things take off for your civilization.
Bronze is pretty hard to get right, though: it’s an alloy of copper and tin,
harder than either of them, and ores of these aren’t found together, and
you need an enclosed ﬁre (like for pottery) to get to the head where the
metal melts and comes out of the ore. Metals travelled huge distances
because they were useful, because societies found them useful enough
to transport thousands of kilometers. You could make weapons and
tools that were better than those available to stone and wood
manipulators. People were making swords, cups, shields, brooches, and
axes. They were growing their farms and making languages.

Stone
Bronze
Iron
Industrial
Information


Iron ore is more abundant than bronze and iron is even harder. But it’s
a bugger to make! You must get it super hot, add charcoal to get rid of
oxygen in the ore, then heat and bang and reheat and bang to get rid of
brittle impurities in the metal. I’m astonished anyone ever ﬁgured it
out, but when they did it changed society again. The swords, cups,
jewelry, and whatnot that were rare enough to be signs of privilege
became ubiquitous. You could have big armies with swords and shields,
you could plough the earth, you could make nails and build ships and
explore the world. All this, of course, happened.

Stone
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Industrial
Information


The next age we’re told about is the industrial age, but there’s no
government panel deciding the name of these things. The previous age
was all about the transformation of matter: chipping sharp bits off,
melting and casting and forging. But the industrial age doesn’t add any
new techniques to manipulating matter so much as it was a new way of
transforming energy.

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Energy
Information


So I like to think of it as the energy age. People took the heat from
burning things and, through the steam engine, turned it into mechanical
motion: things spinning, hitting, pumping. The steam engine was a
valuable invention in the decades after it was created, not because
everyone rushed off to invent steam electricity generators and steam
cars, but because it produced regular motion. One of the ﬁrst
commercial applications were pumping water out of mines, so you could
extract more coal and ore from them.
This transformation of energy got us machinery, standardized
components, mass production, city-wide electricity, national power
grids, tractors, automobiles, and all the other trappings of civilization.
And they changed life, every aspect of it. I’m not talking about the
growth of cities--we’ve had cities for thousands of years, and they’ve
always vacuumed people up. In Shakespeare’s day, more people died in
London than were born in it, and that was true for centuries as
immigration and disease fought it out.
I’m talking about everything from what we did in a day to when we did
it: the idea of a standardized day only got started with the factory. If
you lived in the countryside and there’s no clock but the sun, you
worked with the sun and maintain an individual schedule. If there’s
electricity and clocks, you live on a non-biological schedule, and
millions had to adjust to this.
All because we learned to transform energy.

Stone
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Energy
Information


Well, now we’re in the age when we transform information. Computers,
directed by programmers, gather, manipulate, and extrude information
to be acted on. The great things of the next century, and the terrible
things, will be done by computers manipulating information.


I used to work for the computer book publisher O’Reilly Media. We make
all the books with the animal covers, though rarely with titles as
awesome as this one. I wrote one, the Perl Cookbook, and on the
strength of that got a job as editor and then conference chair.

Unix


Tim got his start on Unix and X Windows books. He was a classics
major, but got into the techwriting business and took to it like a duck to
water. [Greek story]

The Internet and the Web


In the early 90s ...
“Internet in a box”
ﬁrst advertising on the Internet
Congress

Open Source


Programming Perl, which we published in '96. 1st edition was in 1991
was one of the top 100 books in any category in borders for all of 1996.

Started Perl Conference, which became Open Source Convention.

O’Reilly’s Business Model


So then we started to ﬁgure out what O’Reilly’s business model was. It’s
not publishing books on random bits of technology. We ﬁgure out
what’s going to be big in 18-24 months, then build things around those.

O’Reilly’s Business Model
Clairvoyancy


This obviously qualiﬁes me to talk about the future to you, because I
successfully did it.

Tim and I built the Where 2.0 conference, about Internet mapping, at a
time when Mapquest’s static maps were the state of the art. We
announced in November and in February Google Maps launched. Win!

Information Age


So what I’m going to do is point you at some interesting technology,
some tools and mindsets that’ll shape the 21st century.
But ﬁrst, you have to understand four basic principles.

1. Moore’s Law


Hands up who knows what Moore’s Law is.

Moore’s Law
SHIT GETS BETTER


It turns out that Moore’s Law is a crock of shit. Everyone thinks that
back when Dinosaurs ruled the computing center, Gordon Moore
(founder of Intel) said “holy shit, these things are doubling in speed
every 18 months!”. Or maybe he said that transistor numbers double
every 18 months. Or maybe he said that transistor density doubles every
18 months. Because what he says he said, and what people report he
said, and what people report has actually happened, changes
periodically as they revise the truth.
So I prefer to think of this as Moore’s Law of General Relativity: shit gets
better year after year. And not just slowly better, exponentially better.
Technically speaking it ought to be dull stuff like the number of
components, but practically speaking it translates to a steady stunning
growth in the capability of computers and stunning drop in price of
equivalent computational power.

Shit doubles every 2 years


So what does it mean to say that your shit doubles in 18 months?
When my son was born, I was using a shiny new 300MHz Pentium and
Intel were just launching 100MHz mobile CPUs. Fast forward to today
when my laptop has 5.6GHz in it (two cores, though) and his phone has
a 1GHz ARM in it.
Moore’s Law is what makes smartphones possible. For the longest time,
phones were very low CPU, stuck in the long slow start of exponential
growth. I knew we’d left the gutter when my Nokia had a C64 emulator
(“holy shit, we’re up to 1981 already!”) and it’s been up up and away
since then.
It’s not just CPU speed, it’s storage (I had 300M back then, now I can
buy a terabyte for less than $100).
Moore’s Law is hitting the limits of what’s possible with current physical
techniques but we’re moving into new techniques and learning to work
with multiple cores.
Ben Hammersley said something profound:

“anything that is dismissed
on the grounds of the
technology-not-being-good-
enough-yet is going to
happen”
—Ben Hammersley


It’s like sciﬁ determinism: if you tell me something outrageous could
happen if only we had the computational power, I can tell you that it will
happen.

2. End of scarcity


Copies are free. Different from every other age.
Ending era of scarcity.
Breaking our copyright laws, all built around regulating copying and tied
up with the fundamental economics of copies.

3. Connectivity changes
everything


bacon makes everything better. bacon or chocolate.
Internet is technology bacon
networks make client-server possible, which is (at its heart) “the cloud”

I wanted to say “improves” but bad things always come with the good.

4. People don’t change


Technology changes how we do it, but we are basically the same eating,
drinking, fornicating, reluctantly working, music-making, social
creatures. We’ve built new political structures, but everywhere it’s the
elites against the commoners. Some things just never change.
Facebook doesn’t create the urge to stalk, to marry, to chat, to show off,
to waste time--those things have always been in us. Technology just
gives these drives a new outlet and a new shape.
No prediction that says we’ll magically become better people because of
technology is going to come true.

Data


The ﬁrst idea is data. It comes from the Enlightenment, exploring how
we know what we know given we could be tricked by our senses. So we
need to measure, and the modern world is full of metrics. We measure
so we can answer the question “what works?” When Amazon want to
know whether dancing penguins on the home page will lead to more
sales, they test: show a thousand people the dancing penguins and see
whether sales for those thousand are higher than for a thousand who
visited at the same time but didn’t see the penguins. This is A/B testing,
something the web makes easy but which is almost impossible on the
old world of CD-distributed software or any other physical artifact.

Big Data


More particularly, though, the 21C will be characterised by LOTS of data.
We can capture far more information that we ever could before, and we
can use it because (thanks to Moore’s Law) we have massive computation
in data centers. Google, Amazon EC2, and other virtualization are all
possible because Moore’s Law has turned a CPU from an expensive
precious resource into a commodity. Google’s MapReduce tool is now
available as an open source tool, Hadoop, for anyone to use.
My favourite stat is that, *last year*, logs from Twitter were *growing* at
12Tb a week last year. We can only analyze that volume of data with
massive computational power.

Sensor Networks


We’ll also get data from sensors. At the moment we see things like Nike
+ (shoe + ipod to track your running), Botanicalls (plant tweets you to
say “water me”), GPS and similar smartphones (see Nathan Eagle’s MIT
research), and RFIDs (tracking locations and presence within an
environment).
This ties into the Quantiﬁed Self phenomenon. We are being measured,
studied, and tracked. There can be good as well as bad to this
measurement, so let’s use this information to improve ourselves. The
21st century will see huge amounts of data from and about us, gathered
by us for our own self-improvement.
(Quantiﬁed Self makes me think of Douglas Adams’s invented planet
Bethselamin, where you’re weighed entering and leaving and differential
unaccounted for excretion is surgically removed from your body as you
go.)

Social Networks


Activity and attention data are everywhere. Here it’s not for our own
use. Every company here is funded by advertising: “if you don’t pay for
it, you’re the product not the customer”. This explains Facebook’s
consistently decreasing approach to privacy.
Even when Facebook hasn’t made a page public, “like” or add an app,
and you’re giving the info to advertisers and other companies. Not just
companies, too: the US govt mine and monitor it actively. You might
think this is good or bad, but it’s happening.
We’re putting our social networks online for good or bad, our network of
friendships and our communications. This is data for analysis, by good
or bad actors. The 21st century will see the apps built as a result of
this.


The old institutions of Media are changing, trying to ﬁnd dollars in
online world. This is a consequence of digital’s ease of copying: the old
business model for journalism was to wrap it in crosswords and ads,
then slap onto dead trees and sell to the customer. Take away the ads
and the dead trees, and you’ve not got nearly so much money to fund
journalists.
Clay Shirky: old institutions are destroyed before the new things come
along. 21C will see the old change, some die, and the new replacements
arrive. They’ll be built by people familiar with software and what it can
do.

Crowdsourcing


Computers can’t do it all, though: crowdsourcing and the augmentation
of humans with computers is massive. Shirky says we have all this
cognitive surplus, spare brain time that we can now choose to deploy in
good ways.
Wikipedia: notable because there’s an invisible culture which ensures
that revisions make the encyclopedia better: naming system, editors,
hierarchy, reviews, discussion. It’s not perfect, but without it you’d have
the other blank space that everyone can write on: a toilet wall.
FoldIt: game based on protein folding. It’s a tricky biological problem,
but one that you can turn into a game as addictive and simple as
minesweeper. Recently hit the news when an HIV-related protein which
had deﬁed analysis for years was folded by gamers in a matter of weeks,
yielding promising drug targets.
GalaxyZoo: telescopes generate terabytes of data taking photos of
space. Famous for Hanny’s Voorwerp. Hanny van Arkel is a
schoolteacher, Dutch, found a new thing. “Voorwerp”=”thingy”. Turned
out to be something unknown to science, about the size of our Milky
Way, she’s now an author on a paper. AND more have been found.
21C won’t be just about software, it’ll be about software and humans
working together.

Biology


One of the big promises of all this computational and storage excess
has been computational biology. Central dogma of biology: DNA to RNA
to proteins. Original conception is that it’s a computer program, so let’s
reverse engineer it. Race to human genome: 725M or 1 CD raw, but
people compress to 4M. 2.9B base pairs, 23k protein-coding genes.
Turns out it’s more like an operating system, interacting, with services.
Need shitloads of data to ﬁnd correlations and track back. C. elegans =
100M base pair, 20k genes.
23 and Me with surveys, for example. Unclear that this model is right,
though: disproving the neat hypothesis may be the best contribution.
Complex systems everywhere, chaotic systems.

Evolutionary algorithms: antenna design that won’t compromise a
patent.

Security


I’m not a technological utopian: technology is, and people use it for
good and bad ends.
No such thing as absolute security, so can only talk about your posture:
what you’re ignoring, what you’re defending against.
Every new technology will face attacks and be twisted in new ways to
bad ends.
“Every complex system has parasites”
Horrors committed: join the Risks Digest, read Bruce Schneier.
Privacy, destruction, control, cyberwarfare are all things to worry about
here.
Also powered by Moore’s Law: breaking passwords ridiculously easy
compared to a decade ago.

Work is of two kinds: ﬁrst, altering the
position of matter at or near the earth's
surface relatively to other such matter;
second, telling other people to do so.
The ﬁrst kind is unpleasant and ill paid;
the second is pleasant and highly paid.
—Bertrand Russell


Russell knew all about avoiding matter relocation, he was a philosopher
and mathematician, two jobs famed for their lack of heavy lifting.

Makers


We haven’t left physical behind: we still build countertops from stone,
statues from bronze, nails from iron, and machines to transform energy.
But the information we manipulate can inform and control the
movement of matter. The software guys are moving into hardware.
This is an artiﬁcial muscle made in Auckland at the Bioengineering Lab.
Hacked Prius: braking, fuel efficiency, safety. Team in NZ working on
electric car, open source drive train. Ian Wright, former Cisco, Tesla,
own car, funded.
DIY quadracopter. DIY Drones. Military, billions, hundreds, home.
Hardware is becoming a matter of software.

Startups


One of the things people are creating are startups
More fun to work for yourself than for someone else
Large companies have large barriers to creativity
Innovator’s Dilemma
Lean Startup: hardest part is ﬁnding the customer, use data to tell you
when you’ve got it right
Startups important for New Zealand


Sir Paul Callaghan, New Zealander of the Year
Everything he talks about is powered by software: milk powder auction.
Tourism won’t make a better country. Food manufacturing won’t make a
better country. We need tech heavy 21st-century startups.

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Energy
Information


So, let’s bring this home. We’ve got these ages.

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Energy
Information


You’ve got the Stone Age of cavemen who learned to farm.

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Energy
Information


You’ve got Bronze Age people who made Stonehenge-like sites, and
ﬁnished Stonehenge.

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Iron
Energy
Information


The Romans conquered the world with iron, conquered and civilized.

Stone
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Iron
Energy
Information


The Victorians did amazing stuff with the transformation of energy:
railroads, the tunnel, London’s sewers.

But who’s the icon for the Information age?


At the moment it’s BIll Gates. But that’s just an artifact of today’s news.
Soon he’ll be a name, like the Rockefellers, and nobody will be too sure
what he did or when he did it (was Rockefeller oil, railroads, property, or
stocks?)


The power to change the 21st century for the better is in your hands.
You are a programmer, you make computer programmes, you can build
the things that shape the 21st century.
Will they be tools of exploitation and oppression?

Do stuff that matters


Work on things that will make the world better. Work on healthcare, on
education. Help parents be better parents, help keep government honest
and help governments to govern more wisely.

The best minds of my
generation are thinking
about how to make people
click ads.
—Jeff Hammerbacher


This is so true. Don’t join the waste of brainpower and potential.

The Future

If computation can make it happen, it will happen
End of scarcity
Connectivity is key
People Don’t Change


So, to recap: the 21st century will be shaped by these forces and by you.



You wield the power of the 21st century. You, programmers, will build
the things that change our world. Build things that make life better, not
for advertisers but for ourselves. Go build something that’ll make your
great-grandchildren proud.

Nat Torkington
nathan@torkington.com


Thank you.

Technology Time Out

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