| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
18 Aug 2004 04:04:11 AM |
| Object: |
Peter Cochrane |
Visions of tomorrow
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=552490
Futurologists have a reputation for grand (and untestable)
predictions. But Peter Cochrane is different. Charles Arthur is
impressed
18 August 2004
The second time I met Peter Cochrane was only a few days after the
first. And of course before the first meeting, years had passed
without our paths crossing. "It's because things happen in clumps!" he
explained breezily. "Nothing is spread out evenly. Everything clumps
together. Galaxies are clumps of matter in the universe. Cities are
clumps of people in a country. And so on."
The more you think about this statement, the more like a universal
axiom it appears to be, working at any level, from the subatomic to
the galactic. Not bad for someone who claims not to have done well at
school.
Insights like that, though usually more attuned to a technological
arena, are frequent in Cochrane's new book, Uncommon Sense. Although
it's essentially a collection of some 50 columns he wrote for the
online site silicon.com (the column still continues), it's a far more
satisfying read in print than on screen.
Cochrane had a distinguished career as the head of BT's research and
development labs, a company for which he worked for more than 38 years
before spinning himself off to become an all-round consultant and
guru.
But, you're probably thinking, people who predict the future are
10-a-penny. They always pull the same trick: predict something
conveniently far off (10 years, a favourite minimum distance, sounds
near enough to be plausible, but is also far away enough that they
won't be called to account) or simply extrapolate from a rather
specialised set of existing data to produce forecasts that make
mathematical sense but none at all socially. Thus George Gilder could
in the Nineties put out newsletters for which people paid big money
that extrapolated a rosy future for internet stocks, which all fell to
earth in the dot.com bust.
However, Professor Cochrane (the title is from the Collier chair for
public understanding of science and technology at the University of
Bristol) has always struck me as different from both crowds. As the
example above shows, he has an apt way of digging underneath our
expectations and beliefs to extract the nuggets of truth.
Such as this: at school, you're taught that the world is generally
well-ordered and completely understood by "linear" systems, with just
little bits that are chaotic and hard to follow. Instead, once you're
thrust into business and life, you realise that chaos is the norm -
just think of the unpredictability of traffic jams on roads you travel
regularly - and that there are only small parts we have well under
control.
Makes sense? OK, now try some technological ones. Satellites have
never made much difference to telecoms, except where installing cables
was hard, and for broadcasts; and they're not the answer to the
"last-mile" problem of getting rural homes wired up with high-speed
internet. There, the solution is line-of-sight radio, which can manage
up to 10 megabits per second.
Or this: power lines won't be able to deliver high-speed internet
access, because all the appliances around the house keep ruining the
data stream, the copper used in mains cables is wrong for data
transmission, and the signals are transmitted by the wires. It's
cheaper, he concludes, to put in those line-of-sight radios. (It'll be
interesting to see whether Scottish and Southern Electricity, which
trialled this technology earlier this year, will indeed roll it out
more widely - and how customer satisfaction goes.)
More widely, he also points out our weakness - as a species - in
dealing with global problems, because those are multi-dimensional:
there are lots of parameters, and tweaking any particular one might
make a big or a tiny difference. But mathematicians are at ease with
multi-dimensional problems, and model them frequently on computers
(the weather is a multi-dimensional problem). For problems such as
Aids, water supplies, drugs, he comments, "without the assistance of
computer models that relate data and decisions to actual outcomes, we
are going to be lost in a sea of meaningless heated debate". For
example: imagine you produced a cheap Aids vaccine and cure for
malaria. Millions more would survive in Africa - but without birth
control, famine would quickly follow, because the system is not set up
to deal with so many people. "The whole system has to be addressed,"
he says, "otherwise the solution could be far worse than the intended
cure."
There are plenty of other targets: managers who are happy to indulge
their children at home, and yet are control freaks to staff who need
to be creative; why you should never delete anything, but just buy
more hard disks (because it makes more sense to store everything,
because you'll be able to search it increasingly effectively in
future); the challenge of pricing software correctly ("too high and it
won't sell, too low and it won't sell, give it away and people won't
value it"); and, as a sort of rallentando at the end, a prediction for
some time between 2010 and 2025 of a "Cambrian explosion" of smart
machines. "If we factor in the long-term impact of exponential
increases in chip performance and bit density, we are looking at more
than one billion times [performance improvement] over the next 30
years."
Beyond 2020, he expects "devices at least one hundred billion times
more powerful than today" with location awareness, cognition and
contextualisation, and the ability to continuously and automatically
configure to a dynamic world.
It sounds like we'll need them - because we certainly have problems
doing it. I'd recommend arming yourself with a helping of Cochrane's
wisdom. He'll probably still be around in 2025 (a sprightly
77-year-old, I don't doubt), but the more of us who can clump together
and think like him, the better.
Peter Cochrane's website: www.cochrane.org.uk/
'Uncommon Sense' is published by Wiley, £16.99
network@independent.co.uk
Charles Arthur
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0403100258.5240b313%40posting.google.com
cluster OR clustered OR clusters OR clumps OR clump
http://news.google.com/news?q=%20cluster%20OR%20clustered%20OR%20clusters%20OR%20clumps%20OR%20clump&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?q=cluster+OR+clustered+OR+clusters+OR+clumps+OR+clump&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&tab=nw&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=cluster+OR+clustered+OR+clusters+OR+clumps+OR+clump&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&output=search&cat=gwd/Top
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_oq=cluster%20clustered%20clusters%20clumps%20clump&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
Peter Cochrane
http://news.google.com/news?q=%20%22Peter%20Cochrane%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Peter+Cochrane%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&tab=nw&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Peter+Cochrane%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&output=search&cat=gwd/Top
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22Peter%20Cochrane%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=dg
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_epq=Peter%20Cochrane&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
A Blueprint for the Future
http://tinyurl.com/9vga
.
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| User: "maff" |
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| Title: Re: Peter Cochrane |
18 Aug 2004 04:51:47 PM |
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(maff) wrote in message news:<18510aff.0408180037.48a1a1f4@posting.google.com>...
Visions of tomorrow
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=552490
[...]
The Unfinished Revolution : How to Make Technology Work for
Us--Instead of the Other Way Around
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0066620686
by Michael L. Dertouzos
http://forums.delphiforums.com/deconland/messages/?msg=2465
A Blueprint for the Future
http://tinyurl.com/9vga
.
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