Although I base my research primarily on articles from the New Yorker and Atlantic Magazines, the New York Times and the Washington Post newspapers as well as several websites such as the MIT Technology Review, Google Tech, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, today’s column springs from two articles in the 5/24/10 Press Republican. Although They both appear on the same page, but they illustrate vastly different aspects of technology’s effect on society.
The first, “Researchers making strides with Cheyenne supercomputer” describes how the biggest, newest, fastest computer can help society with solving problems that were previously deemed intractable such as accurate weather and earthquake prediction. Housed in Cheyenne, Wyoming this “giant brain”, appropriately named “Yellowstone” can perform 1.5 quadrillion operations per second.
When I read this fact, I paused and remembered my experience working on an earlier supercomputer, the ILLIAC IV, during the late 60s to early 70s at the University of Illinois (you may recall HAL’s reference to ILLIAC I in Kubrick’s classic film “2001” ). It’s claim to fame was that it was capable of performing one million operations per second --- that’s a billion times faster. This line of thought led me to considering the obvious question, “What kind of ‘operation’ are we talking about here? Surely not brain surgery. If you guessed that it’s more likely some internal electronic computer operation such as doing arithmetic you’d be right on track. In fact the ILLIAC IV was advertised as achieving a “megaflop” in one second which was an acronym for “ one million floating point additions”. And what, you may ask, is a “floating point addition” as opposed to a plain vanilla one? Well,like any technical problem, the details are somewhat technical but the gist is that the computer circuitry for adding whole numbers is simpler and faster than the circuitry for adding numbers with decimal points (which are called “floating point”), so, unlike in a social situation, it’s more glorious achievement to do a “flop”.
ILLIAC IV was not a commercial success; only a few ILLIACs were sold to government agencies but many of its technical innovations were incorporated into future generations of supercomputers leading to Yellowstone. (Makes you wonder if the Edsel possibly had similar effects on automobiles...)
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry after I read the second article on the Science page, “Ready for liquor bottles smart enough to talk to Smartphones?”. When I first started following the development of the “Internet of Things” I was moderately impressed with the idea that milk cartons could be designed with gizmos that broadcast to your smartphone/watch when they were past expiration date or down to one-quarter and that it was time to start thinking about adding them to your grocery list. But this “advance” seems to me to have crossed the threshold of common sense. Based on those frames that continuously scroll through photographs of your grandchild’s last birthday or your recent travels, this advance allows you to post a scrolling text from your smart device (smartwatch, smartphone, tablet, pc, etc, etc etc...) that will display ala Times Square Banner Headlines on your...wait for it....liquor bottle.
While I can understand the benefits accrued to the purveyor of spirits (it can also track the location of the bottle which, in and of itself, is a tiny bit creepy) I fail to see how it will help me become a better person (unless, in its next version, it will sound warnings that I’ve had my limit and refuse to dispense for 24 hours). This is a good example of an NTTT technology (Not Thought Through Thoroughly).
On the plus side, here’s an amusing example that low tech still survives somewhere in this world: “Police in India this week arrested a pigeon on charges of spying for Pakistan. The bird,..., reportedly had a "stamped message" on its body that ... included a Pakistani phone number. An X-ray of the bird didn't show anything out of the ordinary, but police have nevertheless registered it as a "suspected spy" and are keeping it in custody.” (www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8685369/india-arrests-pigeon-spy-pakistan)
My faith in a Deity with a sense of humor has been restored.
The first, “Researchers making strides with Cheyenne supercomputer” describes how the biggest, newest, fastest computer can help society with solving problems that were previously deemed intractable such as accurate weather and earthquake prediction. Housed in Cheyenne, Wyoming this “giant brain”, appropriately named “Yellowstone” can perform 1.5 quadrillion operations per second.
When I read this fact, I paused and remembered my experience working on an earlier supercomputer, the ILLIAC IV, during the late 60s to early 70s at the University of Illinois (you may recall HAL’s reference to ILLIAC I in Kubrick’s classic film “2001” ). It’s claim to fame was that it was capable of performing one million operations per second --- that’s a billion times faster. This line of thought led me to considering the obvious question, “What kind of ‘operation’ are we talking about here? Surely not brain surgery. If you guessed that it’s more likely some internal electronic computer operation such as doing arithmetic you’d be right on track. In fact the ILLIAC IV was advertised as achieving a “megaflop” in one second which was an acronym for “ one million floating point additions”. And what, you may ask, is a “floating point addition” as opposed to a plain vanilla one? Well,like any technical problem, the details are somewhat technical but the gist is that the computer circuitry for adding whole numbers is simpler and faster than the circuitry for adding numbers with decimal points (which are called “floating point”), so, unlike in a social situation, it’s more glorious achievement to do a “flop”.
ILLIAC IV was not a commercial success; only a few ILLIACs were sold to government agencies but many of its technical innovations were incorporated into future generations of supercomputers leading to Yellowstone. (Makes you wonder if the Edsel possibly had similar effects on automobiles...)
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry after I read the second article on the Science page, “Ready for liquor bottles smart enough to talk to Smartphones?”. When I first started following the development of the “Internet of Things” I was moderately impressed with the idea that milk cartons could be designed with gizmos that broadcast to your smartphone/watch when they were past expiration date or down to one-quarter and that it was time to start thinking about adding them to your grocery list. But this “advance” seems to me to have crossed the threshold of common sense. Based on those frames that continuously scroll through photographs of your grandchild’s last birthday or your recent travels, this advance allows you to post a scrolling text from your smart device (smartwatch, smartphone, tablet, pc, etc, etc etc...) that will display ala Times Square Banner Headlines on your...wait for it....liquor bottle.
While I can understand the benefits accrued to the purveyor of spirits (it can also track the location of the bottle which, in and of itself, is a tiny bit creepy) I fail to see how it will help me become a better person (unless, in its next version, it will sound warnings that I’ve had my limit and refuse to dispense for 24 hours). This is a good example of an NTTT technology (Not Thought Through Thoroughly).
On the plus side, here’s an amusing example that low tech still survives somewhere in this world: “Police in India this week arrested a pigeon on charges of spying for Pakistan. The bird,..., reportedly had a "stamped message" on its body that ... included a Pakistani phone number. An X-ray of the bird didn't show anything out of the ordinary, but police have nevertheless registered it as a "suspected spy" and are keeping it in custody.” (www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8685369/india-arrests-pigeon-spy-pakistan)
My faith in a Deity with a sense of humor has been restored.
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