[ed. Fascinating read. Don't be put off by the 'Programming Perl' subject in the title]
....Now, let's go and borrow that time machine and take a look at 2034.
2034 superficially looks a lot like 2014, only not. After all, most of 2034 is already here, for real, in 2014.
The one stunningly big difference is that today we're still living through exponential change: by 2034, the semiconductor revolution will have slowed down to the steady state of gradual incremental changes I described earlier. Change won't have stopped — but the armature of technological revolution will have moved elsewhere.
Now for a whistle-stop tour of 2034:
Of the people alive in 2014, about 75% of us will still be alive. (I feel safe in making this prediction because if I'm wildly wrong — if we've undergone a species extinction-level event — you won't be around to call me on my mistake. That's the great thing about futurology: when you get it really wrong, nobody cares.)
About two-thirds of the buildings standing in 2034 are already there in 2014. Except in low-lying areas where the well-known liberal bias of climatological science has taken its toll.
Automobiles look pretty much the same, although a lot more of them are electric or diesel-electric hybrids, and they exhibit a mysterious reluctance to run over pedestrians, shoot stop lights, or exceed the speed limit. In fact, the main force opposing the universal adoption of self-driving automobiles will probably be the Police unions: and it's only a matter of time before the insurance companies arm-wrestle the traffic cops into submission.
Airliners in 2034 look even more similar to those of 2014 than the automobiles. That's because airliners have a design life of 30 years; about a third of those flying in 2034 are already in service in 2014. And another third are new-build specimens of models already flying — Boeing 787s, Airbus 350s.
Not everything progresses linearly. Every decade brings a WTF moment or two to the history books: 9/11, Edward Snowden, the collapse of the USSR. And there are some obvious technology-driven radical changes. By 2034 Elon Musk has either declared bankruptcy or taken his fluffy white cat and retired to his billionaire's lair on Mars. China has a moon base. One of Apple, Ford, Disney, or Boeing has gone bust or fallen upon hard times, their niche usurped by someone utterly unpredictable. And I'm pretty sure that there will be some utterly bizarre, Rumsfeldian unknown-unknowns to disturb us all. A cure for old age, a global collapse of the financial institutions, a devastating epidemic of Martian hyper-scabies. But most of the changes, however radical, are not in fact very visible at first glance.
Most change is gradual, and it's only when we stack enough iterative changes atop one another that we get something that's immediately striking from a distance. The structures we inhabit in 2034 are going to look much the same: I think it's fairly safe to say that we will still live in buildings and wear clothes, even if the buildings are assembled by robots and the clothes emerge fully-formed from 3D printers that bond fibres suspended in a liquid matrix, and the particular fashions change. The ways we use buildings and clothes seem to be pretty much immutable across deep historical time.
So let me repeat that: buildings and clothing are examples of artifacts that may be manufactured using a variety of different techniques, some of which are not widespread today, but where the use-case is unlikely to change.
But then, there's a correspondingly different class of artifact that may be built or assembled using familiar techniques but put to utterly different uses.
Take the concrete paving slabs that sidewalks are made from, for example. Our concrete paving slab of 2034 is likely to be almost identical to the paving slab of 2014 — except for the trivial addition of a dirt-cheap microcontroller powered by an on-die photovoltaic cell, with a handful of MEMS sensors and a low power transceiver. Manufactured in bulk, the chip in the paving slab adds about a dollar to its price — it makes about as much of a difference the logistics of building a pavement as adding a barcoded label does to the manufacture and distribution of t-shirts. But the effect of the change, of adding an embedded sensor and control processor to a paving stone, is revolutionary: suddenly the sidewalk is part of the internet of things.
What sort of things does our internet-ified paving slab do?
For one thing, it can monitor its ambient temperature and warn its neighbors to tell incoming vehicle traffic if there's a danger of ice, or if a pot-hole is developing. Maybe it can also monitor atmospheric pressure and humidity, providing the city with a micro-level weather map. Genome sequencing is rapidly becoming the domain of micro-electromechanical systems, MEMS, which as semiconductor devices are amenable to Moore's law: we could do ambient genome sequencing, looking for the tell-tale signs of pathogens in the environment. Does that puddle harbor mosquito larvae infected with malaria parasites?
With low-power transceivers our networked sidewalk slab can ping any RFID transponders that cross it, thereby providing a slew of rich metadata about its users. If you can read the unique product identifier labels in a random pedestrian's clothing you can build up a database that identifies citizens uniquely — unless they habitually borrow each other's underwear. You can probably tell from their gait pattern if they're unwell, or depressed, or about to impulsively step out into the road. In which case your internet-of-things enabled sidewalk can notify any automobiles in the vicinity to steer wide of the self-propelled traffic obstacle.
It's not just automobiles and paving slabs that have internet-connected processors in them in 2034, of course. Your domestic washing machine is going to have a much simpler user interface, for one thing: you shove clothing items inside it and it asks them how they want to be washed, then moans at you until you remove the crimson-dyed tee shirt from the batch of whites that will otherwise come out pink.
And meanwhile your cheap Indonesian toaster oven has a concealed processor embedded in its power cable that is being rented out by the hour to spammers or bitcoin miners or whatever the equivalent theft-of-service nuisance threat happens to be in 2034.
In fact, by 2034, thanks to the fallout left behind by the end of Moore's law and it's corollary Koomey's law (that power consumption per MIP decreases by 50% every 18 months), we can reasonably assume that any object more durable than a bar of soap and with a retail value of over $5 probably has as much computing power as your laptop today — and if you can't think of a use for it, the advertising industry will be happy to do so for you (because we have, for better or worse, chosen advertising as the underlying business model for monetizing the internet: and the internet of things is, after all, an out-growth of the internet).
The world of 2034 is going to superficially, outwardly, resemble the world of 2014, subject to some obvious minor differences — more extreme weather, more expensive gas — but there are going to be some really creepy differences under the surface. In particular, with the build-out of the internet of things and the stabilization of standards once the semiconductor revolution has run its course, the world of 2034 is going to be dominated by metadata.
Today in 2014 we can reasonably to be tracked by CCTV whenever we show our faces in public, and for any photograph of us to be uploaded to Facebook and tagged by location, time, and identity using face recognition software. We know our phones are tracking us from picocell to picocell and, at the behest of the NSA, can be turned into bugging devices without our knowledge or consent (as long as we're locked out of our own baseband processors).
By 2034 the monitoring is going to be even more pervasive. The NETMIT group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are currently using WiFi signals to detect the breathing and heart rate of individuals in a room: wireless transmitters with steerable phased-array antennae that can beam bandwidth through a house are by definition excellent wall-penetrating radar devices, and just as the NSA has rooted many domestic routers to inspect our packets, so we can expect the next generation of spies to attempt to use our routers to examine our bodies.
The internet of things needs to be able to rapidly create dynamic routing tables so that objects can communicate with each other, and a corollary of that requirement is that everything knows where it is and who it belongs to and who has permission to use them. This has good consequences and bad consequences.
....Now, let's go and borrow that time machine and take a look at 2034.
2034 superficially looks a lot like 2014, only not. After all, most of 2034 is already here, for real, in 2014.
The one stunningly big difference is that today we're still living through exponential change: by 2034, the semiconductor revolution will have slowed down to the steady state of gradual incremental changes I described earlier. Change won't have stopped — but the armature of technological revolution will have moved elsewhere.
Now for a whistle-stop tour of 2034:
Of the people alive in 2014, about 75% of us will still be alive. (I feel safe in making this prediction because if I'm wildly wrong — if we've undergone a species extinction-level event — you won't be around to call me on my mistake. That's the great thing about futurology: when you get it really wrong, nobody cares.)
About two-thirds of the buildings standing in 2034 are already there in 2014. Except in low-lying areas where the well-known liberal bias of climatological science has taken its toll.
Automobiles look pretty much the same, although a lot more of them are electric or diesel-electric hybrids, and they exhibit a mysterious reluctance to run over pedestrians, shoot stop lights, or exceed the speed limit. In fact, the main force opposing the universal adoption of self-driving automobiles will probably be the Police unions: and it's only a matter of time before the insurance companies arm-wrestle the traffic cops into submission.
Airliners in 2034 look even more similar to those of 2014 than the automobiles. That's because airliners have a design life of 30 years; about a third of those flying in 2034 are already in service in 2014. And another third are new-build specimens of models already flying — Boeing 787s, Airbus 350s.
Not everything progresses linearly. Every decade brings a WTF moment or two to the history books: 9/11, Edward Snowden, the collapse of the USSR. And there are some obvious technology-driven radical changes. By 2034 Elon Musk has either declared bankruptcy or taken his fluffy white cat and retired to his billionaire's lair on Mars. China has a moon base. One of Apple, Ford, Disney, or Boeing has gone bust or fallen upon hard times, their niche usurped by someone utterly unpredictable. And I'm pretty sure that there will be some utterly bizarre, Rumsfeldian unknown-unknowns to disturb us all. A cure for old age, a global collapse of the financial institutions, a devastating epidemic of Martian hyper-scabies. But most of the changes, however radical, are not in fact very visible at first glance.
Most change is gradual, and it's only when we stack enough iterative changes atop one another that we get something that's immediately striking from a distance. The structures we inhabit in 2034 are going to look much the same: I think it's fairly safe to say that we will still live in buildings and wear clothes, even if the buildings are assembled by robots and the clothes emerge fully-formed from 3D printers that bond fibres suspended in a liquid matrix, and the particular fashions change. The ways we use buildings and clothes seem to be pretty much immutable across deep historical time.
So let me repeat that: buildings and clothing are examples of artifacts that may be manufactured using a variety of different techniques, some of which are not widespread today, but where the use-case is unlikely to change.
But then, there's a correspondingly different class of artifact that may be built or assembled using familiar techniques but put to utterly different uses.
Take the concrete paving slabs that sidewalks are made from, for example. Our concrete paving slab of 2034 is likely to be almost identical to the paving slab of 2014 — except for the trivial addition of a dirt-cheap microcontroller powered by an on-die photovoltaic cell, with a handful of MEMS sensors and a low power transceiver. Manufactured in bulk, the chip in the paving slab adds about a dollar to its price — it makes about as much of a difference the logistics of building a pavement as adding a barcoded label does to the manufacture and distribution of t-shirts. But the effect of the change, of adding an embedded sensor and control processor to a paving stone, is revolutionary: suddenly the sidewalk is part of the internet of things.
What sort of things does our internet-ified paving slab do?
For one thing, it can monitor its ambient temperature and warn its neighbors to tell incoming vehicle traffic if there's a danger of ice, or if a pot-hole is developing. Maybe it can also monitor atmospheric pressure and humidity, providing the city with a micro-level weather map. Genome sequencing is rapidly becoming the domain of micro-electromechanical systems, MEMS, which as semiconductor devices are amenable to Moore's law: we could do ambient genome sequencing, looking for the tell-tale signs of pathogens in the environment. Does that puddle harbor mosquito larvae infected with malaria parasites?
With low-power transceivers our networked sidewalk slab can ping any RFID transponders that cross it, thereby providing a slew of rich metadata about its users. If you can read the unique product identifier labels in a random pedestrian's clothing you can build up a database that identifies citizens uniquely — unless they habitually borrow each other's underwear. You can probably tell from their gait pattern if they're unwell, or depressed, or about to impulsively step out into the road. In which case your internet-of-things enabled sidewalk can notify any automobiles in the vicinity to steer wide of the self-propelled traffic obstacle.
It's not just automobiles and paving slabs that have internet-connected processors in them in 2034, of course. Your domestic washing machine is going to have a much simpler user interface, for one thing: you shove clothing items inside it and it asks them how they want to be washed, then moans at you until you remove the crimson-dyed tee shirt from the batch of whites that will otherwise come out pink.
And meanwhile your cheap Indonesian toaster oven has a concealed processor embedded in its power cable that is being rented out by the hour to spammers or bitcoin miners or whatever the equivalent theft-of-service nuisance threat happens to be in 2034.
In fact, by 2034, thanks to the fallout left behind by the end of Moore's law and it's corollary Koomey's law (that power consumption per MIP decreases by 50% every 18 months), we can reasonably assume that any object more durable than a bar of soap and with a retail value of over $5 probably has as much computing power as your laptop today — and if you can't think of a use for it, the advertising industry will be happy to do so for you (because we have, for better or worse, chosen advertising as the underlying business model for monetizing the internet: and the internet of things is, after all, an out-growth of the internet).
The world of 2034 is going to superficially, outwardly, resemble the world of 2014, subject to some obvious minor differences — more extreme weather, more expensive gas — but there are going to be some really creepy differences under the surface. In particular, with the build-out of the internet of things and the stabilization of standards once the semiconductor revolution has run its course, the world of 2034 is going to be dominated by metadata.
Today in 2014 we can reasonably to be tracked by CCTV whenever we show our faces in public, and for any photograph of us to be uploaded to Facebook and tagged by location, time, and identity using face recognition software. We know our phones are tracking us from picocell to picocell and, at the behest of the NSA, can be turned into bugging devices without our knowledge or consent (as long as we're locked out of our own baseband processors).
By 2034 the monitoring is going to be even more pervasive. The NETMIT group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are currently using WiFi signals to detect the breathing and heart rate of individuals in a room: wireless transmitters with steerable phased-array antennae that can beam bandwidth through a house are by definition excellent wall-penetrating radar devices, and just as the NSA has rooted many domestic routers to inspect our packets, so we can expect the next generation of spies to attempt to use our routers to examine our bodies.
The internet of things needs to be able to rapidly create dynamic routing tables so that objects can communicate with each other, and a corollary of that requirement is that everything knows where it is and who it belongs to and who has permission to use them. This has good consequences and bad consequences.
by Charles Stross, Charlie's Diary | Read more:
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