I’ve no idea how accurate this information is, but in a short video on http://www.scottmcleod.org/didyouknow.wmv there are some wild predictions about the future… under the title of “Did you know?”

This echoes somewhat  “The Age of Spiritual Machines” by the eminent Ray Kurzweil (I saw him present once, and it was truly amazing – this guy has a brain the size of, I suppose, a planet … e.g. he invented OCR when a blind friend complained that the supply of audio books was seriously limited), where the author theorises that technological evolution is almost exponential – ie. the pace of change is accelerating.

Kurzweil reckons the first 30 years of the 21st century will see the same degree of technology progression that the entire 20th century saw, and that the next 10 years will see the same again… to the point where, by the middle of the century, nano-bots will be injected into the bloodstream to repair damaged organs and defeat blood-borne diseases.

Of course, all of this could be a load of old tosh – after all, people thought in the 1950s that we’d all be piloting flying cars, wearing space suits, and eating food in pill-form by the end of the 20th century…

I was reminded the other day of a term coined by Edward Hallowell in his excellent and thought-provoking book, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD.

Hallowell, an ex-Harvard Medical School specialist in Attention Deficit Disorder, has deduced that technology and the modern way of life & work is turning us all into ineffective wastrels who burn out by the time we’re 50.

He tells a story of how he was staying in a remote cottage which had one of the old rotary Bakelite telephones, and no mobile coverage, and the act of dialling his friend in a nearby village took so long (in reality only a few seconds… the number probably had lots of 8s, 9s and 0s in it), that he was getting madly frustrated. This set him thinking about how strange it was that a simple act of waiting 15 seconds or so for something that normally takes a snap on a push-button phone, should be enough to make him near apoplectic. He started finding similarities in the symptoms of ADD patients he’s treated, and normal people who just get frustrated, distracted, impatient etc, in the normal run of their daily lives.

He’s even coined some interesting new terminology:

Vocabulary for a crazy world

Screensucking: wasting time stuck on the internet or Blackberry when you could be doing some work

EMV or e-mail voice: the ghostly tone of voice people assume on the phone when they are talking to you and reading their e-mail at the same time

Frazzing: when you are multitasking ineffectively

Gemmelsmerch: the ubiquitous force that distracts us from whatever we are doing with the desire to start doing something else

Doomdarts: suddenly remembered commitments such as a birthday or an invitation that had slipped our minds in all that frazzing and screensucking

I particularly like EMV and Doomdarts – been there, done that, many times…

Ever since reading  Robert X Cringley‘s excellent 1996 Accidental Empires book (which actually has the even more excellent full title of Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date), I’ve been interested in some of the history behind the way the PC and internet industry has evolved. I’ve always loved Cringley’s description of Steve Jobs as “The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley”… (in fact, he even opens Accidental Empires with a line akin to the opener from the sadly departed Douglas Adams’ tome, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which was, “High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.”)

Many commentators would trace the genesis of a lot of technology we now take for granted back to Xerox Corp’s famed Palo Alto Research Center, aka PARC. The roll call of what was supposedly invented at PARC is long – laser printers, ethernet, the bitmapped display, GUI, mouse, object-oriented programming, distributed computing… the list goes on.

Legend goes a little fuzzy though – not everything that came out of PARC originated there, but a lot of the researchers who worked there in the glory days brought ideas with them and refined them enough to be useful (eg Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse before coming to Xerox but perfected its use with the new bitmapped displays and Graphical User Interface). Legend also has it (backed up by some fact, in fact) that The Most Dangerous Man in Silicon Valley himself was given a guided tour of PARC’s facilities, saw the Alto computer they’d invented (showcasing their GUI, mouse et al) and became inspired to have Apple launch the Lisa computer, which was the forerunner of the Mac.

Anyway, a few years ago I picked up Dealers of Lightning – a potted history of what happened at PARC, and it really is a fascinating read. It can be a bit heavy going in places but gives a great insight not only into the amazing work they did at PARC (and the disdain the industry poured on Xerox Research for basically inventing the world as we know it but then alledgedly doing nothing with it, because they couldn’t see how it related to selling photocopiers), and it also paints an inspiring portrait of the head of the Computer Science Lab, Bob Taylor.

Taylor’s basic philosophy was to hire people that were smarter than he was (and he was the guy who founded ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, so must be a bit of a smart cookie himself). He also decided, in the CSL, that he couldn’t manage any more than 50 people directly, so he set the cap on that size of organisation (since he didn’t want to introduce layers of management), and just went about making sure those 50 were the best he could possibly find. What an visionary management style, and an amazing story.

It’s also interesting to see how many of the luminaries mentioned in this book as the fathers of computing as we know it, now show up in the Microsoft Global Address List 🙂

//Ewan