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| INSTANT ON
March 24, 2023
Have you considered how long it takes to do anything today?
Every time we flip a switch, click a mouse, open an app, send or read a text – it’s instantaneous.
Add to that even the simplest analysis of time taken; consider the path of travel of that email you send, whether it took you hours or only 15 seconds to compose; once you hit send (same true for texts), that message goes from computer to router to server to ‘some service in a room full of servers somewhere on land but called the cloud’ thousands of miles away, but it goes up to a low orbit satellite and back down to that server bank; and then it takes a similar reverse route to a satellite that sends the message to another land-based server bank who in turn push it out to take a similar trip to the server bank of the party you are sending to – and all of that takes less than a second.
The delay is then on the part of the recipient to open, read, and reply – but when they do respond, the entire process is repeated in full detail (not my abbreviated description,) which also takes a second.
Does anyone remember dial-up?
Or remember real mail in an envelope or couriers in a pre-internet world?
How long has it been since we checked the mail or rushed at closing time to make the drop in the mailbox so we wouldn’t lose a day?
Now we expect our communication, from worthless and trivial to highly sensitive and urgent – to fly enormous distances, complex routing, and get to us in partial-second.
I remember in the early days of my computer use, circa 1990, before SPAM became something other than meat in a can, with no expectation of the speed and sophistication in technology we enjoy today – I was watching Bill Gates being interviewed, describing what he was most focused on as the most significant challenges that he expected would be solved soon.
He named two: instant-on and eliminating SPAM.
Even the brightest guys can’t be right about everything.
And we all know that SPAM has given rise to something far beyond annoyance: phishing, identity theft, fraud, and many other crimes, and it remains unsolved and probably will stay with us until the last fool who clicks on suspicious links has died …
Always on, however, is another matter.
Yesterday I turned off my computer at my home office – closing all apps, my email accounts, website addresses, etc. (each of which I connect with every day as I described above), drove to the office, docked my computer and lifted the lid …
It automatically turned on and waited for me to insert a password. I was unpacking my bag, laying out a newspaper to read, brewing a cup of coffee, and getting organized at my desk for a busy day. THEN, I typed in my password. Within about 30 seconds, I opened my G-mail, Shaw, and two other primary business e-mail accounts, my ‘always on’ apps of Merriam-Webster, Grammarly, my Google Chrome search page, my Google newsfeed page, and my three newswire feeds. Instantly (at the speed described above), all those emails (about 200, including newswire feeds) were on my machine, ready to be read, deleted, marked as SPAM, or left for looking at later.
Because these things are ALWAYS ON.
The not-always part is whether we are connected, whether we are reading or not. For my generation of users, this is still wide-eyed OMG time amazement. For younger generations they’ve not known it any other way, so the idea of an outage, being disconnected or not having a multi-function device on their wrist or in their pocket – or both is unthinkable.
If I drive away from the office without my computer bag, briefcase, or wallet – I get a notification on my phone because the satellite sweeps the planet every 5 minutes, so my Air-tags know where I am (or where my phone or wallet is), and know where my other tags are sitting or left behind …
We live in a world far beyond anything Bill Gates ever imagined. He’s obviously found a more viable project than ridding the world of SPAM; he’s busing curing diseases by throwing money at them. Sure, intelligence too, but mostly money. And where did he get all that money? Wasn’t it from you and me, each time we bought a new device, tool, phone, computer or watch-that-does-everything – weren’t we investing in the future work he is doing? I know that we should not give the Bill Gates-es of the world too much credit, but we should also be careful not to provide them with too little because they are crucial to progress. Just as Einstein was. But great innovation is not always a step forward for good; sometimes, it’s a step toward horrible things too.
I think the world will tolerate Musk, soon forget Trump, Putin will die or be eliminated when replaced by a new despot, the world’s population will struggle to feed itself, stave off or slow the pandemics and inflation, and take us into a new era in the centuries to come where A.I. will eventually fail when it tasks itself to eliminate SPAM.
While we are most enamoured by today’s technology and its problems, whatever replaces the internet we know today with something NEW that revolutionizes personal lives and business as we know it, there are things we’ll never solve.
Ask yourself which of these might be solved/replaced/improved in your lifetime: SPAM, pandemics, climate change/global warming, a transition from a 91,000 barrels/day oil consumption to the no-carbon economy, supply-chain gridlock, political warfare, money, crypto-everything, one world government, a single currency for the world, equal rights for women (and all other letters of the alphabet), equal rights for people with disabilities, genuine reconciliation and equal opportunities/quality of life/income for indigenous Canadians?
I think we’ll resolve some of those, hopefully, all of them, but the realist in me says there are new problems we can’t imagine today to replace them, just as instant on and SPAM perplexed Gates back in the day …
Will the world be a happier place?
Or an unhappier one with better technology?
The farmer will tell you that pigs wish for swill.
What do you wish for?
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