Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II
blogs.forbes.com
blogs.forbes.com
The cellphone was invented after that and has forever changed the way we reach people and fundamentally how they are reachable.
Do you remember life pre-cellphones? When you left your house you literally dropped off the map. There was no way of anyone knowing where you were or where you were going. Unless you let them know beforehand, there was no way for people to catch-up with you when you got there. All sorts of tiny events required massive planning.
Now when you leave the house, should you so please (and the vast majority do) you can be reached. Climbing a mountain? In another country? Nobody knows this? They can still contact you! You can be at a place you've never been before and your friend can contact you and meet you there!
I actually think this disrupts my zen a little bit; I'd rather not be reachable at all times. I rarely pick up my phone - maybe for my father, my brother, or my girlfriend. Everyone else can leave a message.
Excellent books though, despite that.
Willis probably could write books which fully encompass the cellphone-era worldview. But will they be Connie Willis books? Or will the loss of all those old tropes make her new style inevitably different from her best-selling old style?
Think of PG Wodehouse, blithely writing novels set in early-twentieth-century England as late as 1975. (Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) Or Bach, plugging away on his late Baroque masterworks years after the Baroque went out of style.
Just think of the Drones club as a bunch of bun-tossing elves.
I feel like the situation is even more extreme in a sense. It seems like ubiquitous information disrupts a large percentage of all possible story plots.
Most story plots hinge on ignorance and discovery. With no physical personification of ignorance, a plot is simply less compelling.
Imagine - * Odysseus travels through exotic, distant lands, that he just forget to do Google earth on beforehand, * Why wait for Godot when you can just give him a call? * etc.
It's best not to think too hard about why a society capable of telling you from orbit precisely how many lifeforms inhabit a planet is incapable of telling you exactly where their captain is when his badge is removed.
Interstellar video was common enough, but I'd question the importance of having video conferencing on top of their voice only communicators. I'd go further, but then I'd be showing how much time I've wasted thinking about this.
DS9>*, btw.
You're spot on about mobile phones changing things; the first mobile phone network was in Japan, and the Nordic countries were second up. The revolutionary innovation, which Kasparov is talking about, was not within the U.S.
Yes. I miss those days.
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Sometimes I just think that the Americans use too much cars (one person driving a car with four seats is an insult to the nature.)
I'm guessing that you'd be mad if more of us had multiple cars, one with one seat, one with two seats, one with three, and another with four. (An extra car just for gas mileage rarely saves money because $5-7k buys a lot of gas.)
I would like to know how you know how many other people that driver will transport before returning home. After all, if they're going to need four seats at any point before they return, they need to start with four seats.
BTW - most of those "four seat" cars actually have five seats.
Another alternative more obvious than keeping a garage full of differently-sized vehicles is to improve the fuel-per-passenger-mile ratio by banding together with other travellers who are going the same way. This is how buses and trains work.
> The obvious alternative is not to have several different cars, but to live closer to where you work, shop and play.
Reread the complaint - driving less doesn't solve it.
> but to live closer to where you work, shop and play.
Those are three (or more) places. You may not be able to live close to all of them. For example, I work in Sunnyvale, my wife works in SF, and we play in Monterey. At times, we've worked other places between PA and SJ.
Where can we live that would be close enough to satisfy you?
> This is how buses and trains work.
Buses and trains don't necessarily go where I want when I want.
Consider 101. It looks like a lot of people going to/from SF until you look at the individuals in those cars. There aren't a small number of end-points. And many of those folks will make side trips that trains/buses don't acomodate.
I've ridden Cal Train (I was on the first baby-bullet and that wasn't my first commute). It's great for some things but it isn't a general solution. That's why it doesn't have much ridership.
> I work in Sunnyvale, my wife works in SF, and we play in Monterey
Yes, but you've chosen those places due to the prevailing social norm in your society to drive all the time. Looking at a map, were I you, I'd live in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara/Cupertino, so that one of you could walk to work, and you wouldn't have to do too much urban driving to get to Monterey.
> Buses and trains don't necessarily go where I want when I want.
How precise do you need to be? Unless I'm going somewhere obscure and far away, or travelling on Sunday, a train can normally get me to within 2 miles of where I want to be, within about half an hour of when I want to be there. That's plenty accurate enough, and certainly as accurate as urban driving.
OTOH I don't trust buses, because there are too many cars jamming up the road.
> Yes, but you've chosen those places due to the prevailing social norm in your society to drive all the time.
You've got it backwards. We chose those jobs because we like to make money. Driving makes it possible for us to earn much more money than we would if we didn't drive.
> Sunnyvale/Santa Clara/Cupertino, so that one of you could walk to work, and you wouldn't have to do too much urban driving to get to Monterey.
There's no "urban" driving between Sunnyvale/SC/Cupertino and Monterey. Urban is inside SF, Oakland/Berkeley.
> Unless I'm going somewhere obscure and far away, or travelling on Sunday, a train can normally get me to within 2 miles of where I want to be, within about half an hour of when I want to be there.
Middle of the day CalTrain schedules aren't every half hour and CalTrain isn't within 2 miles of everywhere I want to go on the Penninsula.
But, let's assume all that AND that CalTrain doesn't take any time to get between destinations. The half-hour schedule gap and 2 miles is an hour travel time.
Only one of our typical weekday trips are anywhere near that.
> That's plenty accurate enough, and certainly as accurate as urban driving.
No, it's not. It's significantly worse than what I've got now. Then again, the only urban driving that we do is inside SF, which is a small minority of our driving as we live in San Jose.
For some of the SJ to SF trips, Caltrain works for us. However, it doesn't a large fraction of the time.
I am guessing, if the gas price triples the same thing may not happen just as it is right now.
The regions under discussion aren't urban so urban transportation simply isn't relevant.
Urban transportation requires a lot of density or a lot of folks going between common end-points. The latter is fairly rare and is very different from a lot of people going past a given point.
We old-timers just used to call it "planning."
The Apple II was a fine product. But it was an incremental advance on its predecessors like the Commodore PET and, er, the Apple I (whose existence Kasparov might perhaps have been able to guess from the Apple II's name).
And: Mobile phones (as already pointed out by simonsarris). GPS. Affordable laser printers. The internet. Functional magnetic resonance imaging. Compact discs. Digital cameras. Etc., etc., etc. There's no shortage of things at least as revolutionary as the Apple II since 1977. (Some of them are based on fundamental developments a few years earlier, but none of them as much so as the Apple II.)
> The internet is older than the Apple II.
Depends on what you mean by "the internet". The core protocols are older than the Apple II, but e.g. the linkup between ARPANET and NSFNet wasn't until the 1980s.
> CDs are notoriously unreliable data storage mechanism which are already obsolete
CDs were revolutionary because they were the first widely used digital music format. And they may be "notoriously unreliable", but my CDs are holding up better in terms of sound quality than a similarly-aged collection of LPs would without heroic measures. Sure, they're certainly obsolescent now, if not actually obsolete, but so is the Apple II.
> laser printers haven't done much other than enable people to waste more paper
Laser printers made it possible for anyone to produce near-publishable-quality documents. This is a Big Deal, even if for whatever reason you don't like it.
> digital cameras are just dense CCDs, nothing great or new about that.
And the Apple II was just a slightly better personal computer. Digital cameras have made traditional film cameras obsolete. They have completely changed the way in which people take pictures by drastically shortening the feedback loop from initial capture to inspection, and by making it essentially free to take large numbers of pictures. They have greatly increased the role of photography in most people's lives. (Still more as they have become commonly integrated into mobile phones.)
Now, if you wish to define "revolutionary" very strictly, then of course you can say that none of these things is really revolutionary -- but then the Apple II will come out also not being revolutionary. Kasparov is wrong either way.
So the 3-D printing industry doesn't have its Apple ][ / Pet / TRS-80 yet. In the computer industry, back in '76, those were only a year away. And then in 5 years there was the IBM PC, in 6 years the Commodore 64, and in 8 years the Macintosh, and suddenly these little machines were everywhere.
Is 3-D printing going to advance that quickly? I doubt it. The technical challenges, and especially the price issues, look pretty tricky. I do think we'll get there before too long, though. It should be interesting to watch.
Perhaps my definition of revolutionary is different than his.
Good current example would be sequencing the human genome. As of right now its mostly useless, but 30 years from now it may be seen as that revolutionary spark. Then some other critic will talk about how nothing big has happened since.
Put another way, looking at all of the world's very most intelligent people, the fraction that care enough about chess to become the world champion if they had the aptitude is very slim.
Pushing beyond that and into the Super to Elite Grandmaster range (2550-2800) requires extraordinary levels of memory, concentration, calculation and pattern matching. Levels that can't be instilled in someone through any amount of training. A person either possesses them or (s)he doesn't.
I lack the evidence at hand, but I'm certain I've seen it before that aptitude in those areas correlates strongly to high intelligence.
though to be fair he follows with
"I think working hard is sometimes just as important to having a talent."
There are lots of people who play chess as much as Kasparov does. Few of them are even remotely near him in skill.
I'm not sure who the best poker player would be, but I've met most of the names that would be thrown out there if you asked the top people, and they're all scary smart. Piano playing is a different type of intelligence than poker or chess, but whoever the world's best piano player is I promise you has a lot of that type.
So, could you explain? (Or were you perhaps being sarcastic, and I missed it?)
One, the moribund aerospace giants that are largely just making the same old rockets, entrenched in their job creation programs.
And two, the new space companies, which are making suborbital rocketplanes and cheap boosters. At present, they may not look impressive because of small steps they are taking, but you just have to look at Scaled's Space Ship Two to realize that radical innovation in their design is not dead.
This has been a long time coming, and there has been a dark age in aerospace.
If you are interested, in my view the seminal event in the new space industry was the Delta Clipper Program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X).
And now there are some really impressive companies trying to make space truly viable for everyone. Some of those companies are.
XCOR Aerospace: http://xcor.com/ Scaled Composites: http://scaled.com/ Masten: http://masten-space.com/ Armadillo: http://armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home
Aside from aerospace. While I agree that there have been game changers like the cell phone, I do agree with Kasparov that there is an atmosphere of risk aversion. For instance I don't see any daring research programs like when DARPA funded Engelbart's augment research that led to Human User Interface objects like the mouse. And that disturbs me. Often visionaries look very crazy or at best very hard to understand because they are operating out of the scope of our context. I don't see people having the patience for these visionaries. And the people who do claim to be visionaries seem to have very conservative imaginations.
There are three revolutionary things about mobile phones that came after the Apple II:
SMS (1984/5)
GPRS (1997)
The ubiquity of mobile phones (late 90s to mid 2000s) with data services.
The technology itself is rarely revolutionary (although developers of HIV treatment drugs may disagree - this also came after the Apple II). The thing that makes it revolutionary is what happens when it reaches ubiquity. Mobile phones with data used to be amazing things. I still remember using a Nokia Communicator for the first time, over an incredible 9.6k link from almost anywhere with GSM coverage. These days your average person in the street probably couldn't tell you whether they were on GSM, HSPDA or Wifi (my wife certainly can't, other than sometimes her phone goes 'slow'). That's what's revolutionary about mobile phones, that they're no longer magical and part of everyone's day.
- Colonizing space.
- Making better use of our land for sustainable agriculture to feed the hungry and the children of our future.
"Because it's there"
There are plenty of possibilities for extinction events right here. Super-volcano eruptions, radical climate change, polar shifting, airborne super-bugs (hello zombie apocalypse!), nuclear mayhem, etc.
Our local environment also has plenty of hazards. Asteroid impact, engulfment in a large solar flare, orbital shifts are the ones that spring to mind.
Our little niche in the galaxy might also have to deal with wandering black holes, gamma-ray bursts from a supernova that is just near enough, the long-term problem of the collision with Andromeda, etc. We won't overcome any of those by colonizing Mars, but still some things to keep in mind.
On a more practical note, extreme endeavors like colonizing space require some radical thinking (and re-thinking of existing concepts). Colonizing means establishing a foothold outside Earth that is self-sustaining (i.e. can do without a lifeline to Earth). We can't actually do that right now. If we set that as a goal we're going to come up with some very interesting stuff, a lot of which is bound to be useful down here.
Life expands or dies, that's the way it works over here. What the universe really seems to abhor (apart from vacuum), is an equilibrium.
Not only that, but the skills and knowledge we gain with it make us even harder to kill. One of these days we may even surpass cockroaches.
Boosting those boosts economics, creates workplaces and moves towards a better future. Even if they don't invent a hyperdrive or any other way to outsmart spacetime.
Another good thing about it for the countries is that it boosts morale, gathers everyone under national colours etc..
Comparative advantage dictates that some massive chunk of land is devoted to cotton; that way when one of our shirts gets a loose thread we can throw it away as fast as possible so that we aren't seen by others as a leper.
Even if things have slowed down for the last few years, so what? Humanity may naturally have occasional refractory periods to catch its collective breath. Complaints like this make me think that such people regard light speed as too slow and try to push humanity to “ludicrous speed,” right past “ridiculous speed.”
Now it might be more dangerous if tech slowed down, because we need new tech to fix disasters caused by the old.
In some industries, like energy, automotive, people have been catching their collective breath for decades and now we're in trouble.
Heck, we even have problems estimating the ecological footprint of anything.
E.g. that proof of concept electrical car that's extra efficient might require some rare metals to produce, and the manufacturing itself could have a bigger impact on nature than its usage. Only in the US there are tens of millions of drivers that will wait in line to buy such a car. And that electricity has to come from somewhere, like a nuclear power plant (which according to many, is less destructive to nature as wind or solar power).
This is a social problem that cannot be solved by technology. If you want to change the world, find a way to make people consume less.
Unless you're talking about StarTrek where food can materialize at the push of a button, or after a "warp maximum; engage" they can arrive at an inhabitable planet in one minute.
In the meantime, this planet doesn't grow any larger and its resources are limited.
I believe that one of our goals as a species should be ubiquitous travel, so that any person can afford to travel anywhere within a reasonable amount of time. The current approach of burning highly refined fossil fuels to power airplanes is obviously unsustainable, but that doesn't mean we stop flying. What we should be doing (and this is a very long-term view) is developing alternative energy storage mechanisms dense enough to power airplanes. One approach that seems reasonable to me is using nuclear power to store energy as biofuel, then switching to solar/wind/hydro power once it is possible to do so. Hypothetically we could design fuels and engines that result in zero harmful waste entering the atmosphere, and direct any byproducts from combustion into the next batch of fuel.
I will concede that Star Trek's unlimited energy universe is a bit like playing Sim City with the money cheat, though.
Is NASA a place where this happens? And is it frivolous to suggest that this kind of innovation without an obvious money-making scheme is important?
On some levels I think Kasparov is right. You could fly from London to New York faster in 1977 (on the Concord) than you can today.
The most recent opportunity to move it forward are mobile devices. Companies are finally rethinking the OS (iOS, ChromeOS), compilers (LLVM), processor architectures (ARM, integrated graphics).
Kasparov probably thinks such steps should not be driven by market forces alone, but by technologists interested in experimentation. The right market conditions came about after decades of the same old more MHz, more HD space rat race. The market is not fast enough, it has other priorities, like getting the products to everybody.
Our biggest technological leaps came about when people with vision got others to invest big. The Industrial Revolution in 1800s, World Wars, Manhattan Project, Space race, PCs, GUIs, .COM bubble, GPS, CERN, LHC etc.. were all obnoxiously big gambles. These have become less popular, people prefer mindless market driven evolutionary change instead of vision.
Examples: How many revolutionary replacements for DRAM have been proposed since the 1103 was introduced? Yet what do we use today? DRAM, because it could incrementally improve to be better and/or cheaper before competing technologies could be introduced
How many revolutionary replacements for the ICE have been proposed? Various jet engines have largely replaced it for aircraft, but the ICE is used just about everywhere else.
How about von neumann computers? There have been many other architectures proposed, but for general purpose computing it still wins out.
The fact that I am writing on this with something that is merely the sum of many incremental improvements to the Apple II just demonstrates the huge amount of untapped potential in the design when it was introduced, not that innovation has stopped.
So it may not have changed the content on the whole but it has certainly changed the content that most people are actually able to experience.
Tech? Portable music/video players have totally changed how I travel, flash memory makes those little plastic thingies from Star Trek work and room-temp color sensors (digital cameras, etc) are pretty amazing.
Then, there's gene sequencing... PCR, ...
Japan? Even if it's Japan, its economy isn't doing that well either.
Europeans take their ideas to the U.S. because in Europe there's no money for innovations. There's no infrastructure for it. China is trying the wrong approach and producing nothing. Japan has incremental improvements ingrained in its culture.
However I think he's right about the stimulus and money. The big government approach doesn't produce anything innovative either. We're building roads in the USA - that's good, but... not gonna change the world now is it? Printing money is currently undermining the USA - it's surprising inflation isn't much worse than it is but at some point something will have to give. It reminds me a bit of the housing bubble - for years house prices were going up, way into silly territory, and beyond. But eventually, the market corrected itself. Now, we're printing US$ Tns every year and there seem to be no negative effects - but that, also, is going to eventually hit home. It's going to make America a country of cheap labor. Inflation will catch up.
Does anyone know what that would be as a percentage of profits?