The Goal
In this series of posts I am going to try to justify why I think we are entering a new age of technology. This is not about dreams, forecasts or predictions, it’s not about flying cars, telepathy or time travel, this is about what we can do today and how it shares striking parallels with our history allowing the many innovators to flourish due to the acts of a relative few. The historians among you will need to forgive me as I wield a poorly aimed keyboard through a house of stacked cards on the subject, however, the characteristics of the industrial revolution can be categorized into a few areas, namely tooling, power, economics and the daily life of a typical citizen of an industrialized country.
Tools
When we look at the early development of tools, from any aspect of the dexterous manipulation of objects, there have been three drivers:
- Minimize the time it would take to perform any task by hand (or paw, hoof or claw)
- Allow the attempt of conceivable tasks that would introduce a recognizable risk.
- Supplement an inadequate capability for the task
So when we look at birds using traffic to break a nut, gorillas using sticks to measure the depths of rivers so their family can cross safely, or Humans using a winch to raise water from a well, we see the three drivers at work. There is a fourth driver, one which is an enabler and inhibitor, a curse and a cure, the beauty and the beast – money. Its influence can be discussed at the Pub, not for this post, we will talk about economics next time.
Human tools at the turn of the 18th century, on the whole, resembled tools that had been used for generations, a slow burn of enhancement when adopting new materials to either add efficiency or lifespan to an existing design. This is not to say that there were not amazing advances happening in other areas, such as medicine and the understanding of the physiology of humans, but we are looking at a time where it was 150 years after Harvey’s description of the blood circulatory system and 150 years before Darwin’s Origins of the Species.
Through the mid 18th century and continuing today tools became part of systems. There were plenty of examples of prior systems, windmills, etc, but during the industrial revolution the level of integration reached a tipping point where the complexity of the process could not be explained by the operator by simply observing the action of the tool.
Accelerated discovery, rapid advancement or ‘innovation’ that achieves wide adoption arguably relates less to the advances in a single field of study and more to favorable conditions of notionally unrelated advances, creating a nexus of opportunity when combined with someone being smart enough to develop the combination or use the nexus to remove road blocks in a stalled development. In the paper A percolation model of innovation in complex technology spaces published in the Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control (2005) Gerald Silverberg and Bart Verspagen write as part of the conclusion that “Innovation is revealed to be a highly path-dependent phenomenon in which excessive myopia can be a dangerous thing, since it can trap the system in dead ends” (p. 241)
Favorable conditions do not always mean positive outcomes for those involved, think of such people as Marie Curie, winner of 2 Nobel prizes, the nexus of photosensitive plates and discovery of radioactivity, leading to the x-ray and CT scanners of today, ultimately died of over exposure to her discovery.
When we look at the tools of today, we are fast approaching the point where casting tangible objects as strong as steel with the precision of laser etching through 3D printing will be as common place as your local key cutting service. Where the definition of mass production will alter its meaning to production by the masses. The recognition of design work in the tech industry is becoming similar to the top music producers, you see this beginning at Apple with their product range – “Have YOU got the latest Jony Ive?”. The combination of distributed production, granular logistics and well-defined interfaces will bring the designers from Cupertino into your home in Coventry. The vision is supported by a rich, open software stack, and sensor, upon sensor, upon sensor to create stream and event data processing sources to personalize any experience.
Machines will repair and maintain their state of operation. Consider a component of a machine breaks or begins to wear. Through sensors, analytics and preemptive action a new part can be
- Constructed using the raw materials that exist within the machines 3D printing material cache
- Delivered by drone to the machine from the nearest inventory warehouse
- Ordered for construction from the most efficient source, where efficiency is could be time, material, cost based.
- Negotiated with a similar machine, perhaps idle, through external inventory and logistics management, summon and dispatch a drone through a securely negotiated geo-position exchange system – or an effective escrow location
This self-healing nature is again formed from a cohesive mix of well-integrated leveraged external and internal services. Prior tooling needed to be self-contained, failure was mitigated through the use of long-lasting component materials and imprecise preventative maintenance, and in many cases making the tool prohibitively expensive and therefore only available to major industry players. Self healing creates the conditions for a more balanced maintenance approach, through the increased use of sensors to determine wear and a set of alternative actions to obtain a viable outcome.
Most tooling up to the present day has primarily been based on monolithic construction, the new tools are aware of their construction, and can rebuild their own sub-components.
Up to this point I have aligned this to a physical tool of some description, the change is equally, or perhaps even more apparent in the computer services industry. Tools are no longer built for a specific task, existing tools can manage that. Tools are now built to facilitate the creative minds, to streamline the connection between idea and product. The tools now create the environment to imagine, envisage and experiment. They understand the environment that the product is destined for, constructing the boundaries and applying the rules, whether scientific or bureaucratic. The operator to observer tipping point I mentioned earlier is being replicated today through the abstraction of workload away from servers through containers to event-driven compute. See one of my earlier blogs.
The change that has started with DevOps is not just about automation and efficiency, it is the first act in the yet unfinished play of handing back the reins of innovation to the inventors.
Next time…
I will take look at Power and Economics and their position in this Webolution, and in the third and final post, how Daily Life is changing.
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