DIGITAL DISRUPTION

DIGITAL DISRUPTION

We hominids evolved in a world where lives were usually lived within a day’s walk. All we had as a means of transmission was storytelling around the campfire in early days. Anything that happened on the other side of the planet wasn’t known. Life was linear and local. Nothing changed for centuries and millennia. Electricity, running water and appliances gave us more time – the many hours we spent pumping, canning, churning, pickling, curing, sweeping, scrubbing, wringing, drying, stitching, mending, knitting, darning, slaving over a hot stove, working the fingers to the bone. The printing press, digital storage, and electronic exchange made possible that anything could be digitized – represented by ones and zeros –to be transmitted at the speed of light and free to produce and share. In the present world our linear mind literally can’t understand exponential progression. We have at our fingertips virtually all the works of genius prior to our time, together with those of our own time. People who lived before our time had neither. Better still, the world’s cultural patrimony is now available not just to the rich and well located but to anyone who’s connected to the vast web of knowledge which means most of humanity, and soon all of it.
An Osborne executive portable computer in 1982 weighed about 14 kgs, costing around $2500. IPhones in 2007 weighed 1/100th and 1/10th of the cost, while having 150 times the processing speed and more than 100,000 times the memory. In rupee-terms, per gram calculation on iPhones has 150,000 times more price performance than Osborne’s executive. This astounding increase in computer power and memory, coupled with a concurrent drop in price and size, is an exponential change at work. Computation keeps getting half as expensive roughly every couple of years. The dramatic drop in costs is a key reason why computation is everywhere these days, having spread from the building-sized computing facilities of yesteryears, in our homes, cars, and pockets and even turning up in unexpected places such as sneakers.
The computing speed seems to be limited by energy. A 1 kg computer that performs at a whopping 36 orders of magnitude more than the computer on which I work may be a reality sometime in the future. Quantum-computer prototypes have already miniaturised their memory by storing one bit per atom. If we keep improving our technology with enough care, foresight, and planning to avoid pitfalls, life will flourish on earth and far beyond for years beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors.
When a camera was dematerialised by a digital camera, the former just disappeared. Following the invention of digital cameras, smartphones hit the market. The digital camera now itself has been dematerialised. Not only did it come free with most phones, customers expected it to come free with phones. Millions of applications on our phones with billions of downloads combined, these now-dematerialised goods and services used to require significant natural resources to produce, a physical distribution system to disperse, and a cadre of highly trained professionals to make sure that everything ran smoothly. None of these elements remain in the picture.
All the consumer goods and services are now available with the average smartphone: cameras, radios, TV, web browsers, recording studios, HD-video camera , two-way video-conferencing via Skype/WhatsApp/Facebook/face time etc, editing-suites, movie-theaters, EKG, GPS-navigators, weather-forecast, word-processors, spreadsheets, stereos, flashlights, board-games, card-games, tape-recorder, calculator, thermometer, clock, full videogame-arcade, a whole range of medical devices, health-data, maps, atlases, your record collection, encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses, translators, libraries of books, world-class education.
Imagine the 1980s luxury technologies. Forty years ago the devices in this collection would cost millions of rupees; today they come free or as apps on our phone. Smartphones are the fastest spreading technology in history. Goods and services change hands without cost. Wikipedia, Linux, WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook, etc, are all free. A shadow economy is happening in plain sight. Democratisation is happening, hard costs dropping so low that they become available and affordable to just everyone. Physical objects turn into bits and are hosted on a digital platform in such high volume that their price approaches zero. With tablets and phones, wireless connectivity allows them to communicate with the internet. Exponential growth, initially deceptive, started becoming visibly disruptive. A new market was created; the existing one disrupted. In an exponential era either you disrupt yourself or be disrupted by someone else. Whenever technology stops improving, it’s replaced with an even better one.
Moore’s law isn’t the only law to emerge in the computer age; Kryder’s law about the exponential cost-performance of hard disk computer storage, and Coopers’ law about the number of possible simultaneous wireless communication doubling every thirty months since 1895 when Marconi first broadcast. Anything that becomes digitised hops on Moore’s law of increasing computational power. In 1975 Moore altered his formulation, but either way, he’s still describing a pattern of exponential growth. With geometric progression, this kind of doubling explosion, from meager to massive, and nearly overnight, makes exponential growth so powerful. And this in our local and linear brains is shocking.
Supermarkets and commodity exchanges sell items that we call ‘resources’. As future life that reaches the technological limit needs mainly the fundamental resource, the so-called baryonic matter (anything made up of atoms or their constituents: quarks and electrons) whatever form this matter is in, advanced technology can rearrange it into any desired substances or objects including power plants, computers, and advanced life forms.

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