Let’s be real: while the design of new devices, operating systems, and applications will be critically important, the types of environments that systems run in tomorrow will also matter.
When we look to the past, we get incredible clues for the future. We see how Moore’s Law and other advances have begun to create this “hockey stick” environment, and we see what we are likely to experience over the next 10, 20, 30 years as new Things build on what we’ve already established, with big data, cloud and AI/ML – and hopefully we’ll be a little more confident about our ability to navigate this world.
In light of this, when David Clark tells us at the start of his speech that “this is not about AI”, one could argue, by way of debate, that this is closely related to what we do in AI/ML and related fields. Just see the link.
Clark has obviously been in the business a long time – one of the highlights of the conversation is when he unrolls an old paper data feed from his old file system, dated August 11, 1976.
This comedy of props leads to a better understanding of how systems have evolved over the last half century and are changing.
When talking about building the Internet, Clark repeatedly asks his audience, “Are we done yet?” »
The answer is no’.
Consider how Clark characterizes the Internet of Things in the video — elaborating on the goal of democratizing data, noting that it will involve a lot of work, and re-estimating the number of devices that will be connected into the billions. (Many of us remember seeing early estimates of around 50 billion devices for IoT, but that was a while ago.)
So: are we done yet?
Clark gives us a good example of criteria for philosophizing about technological systems: who will these things speak to? What will they say and in what language? How much can we trust them?
He also gives a concrete example of infrastructure: traffic lights, of which there are about 330,000, he says, in the United States.
How do we know that they are all correctly connected and safe from tampering?
In other words, safety is paramount.
You also get a rare glimpse into one of Clark’s brief remarks when he talks about evaluating “cool” new technologies – of which we’ve seen a lot over the past few years!
Clark asks another question: do we want our systems to be open ecosystems or siled applications?
Which interface specifications will win out?
“Each set of things will have to answer these questions,” Clark says. He advocates open structures.
There’s another interesting point where Clark says that early HTML was “pretty harmless” until people wanted to inject active code into the client/server interaction. It invites us to think about how emerging technological capabilities will ultimately be used.
We agree that open systems will fare better in tomorrow’s technological world, where we will obviously have to contend with fairly powerful AI systems. Look for more on this blog to be aware of what is happening around you with all kinds of “intelligent machines”.
Portrait of David Clark