Author: JP

Science museums have always entranced me. I must have been around eight or nine when I was first taken to the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum in Calcutta, a wonderful institution. I went there regularly, sometimes out of sheer boredom. Not far from there was an ice rink. For a pittance I could walk around the museum in torrid heat, and then walk over to cool off in the ice rink. I never skated. I just luxuriated in the coolth for a while and then went home.

When I went there, I had no idea of the history of the place. For that I needed Wikipedia, from which I learnt that the site and historical mansion used to belong to the Tagores, and that it was bought from the Tagore family by GD Birla with the intention of making it his family home, and that he gave it to Jawaharlal Nehru to use for the advancement of science in India. I’m grateful to all of them.

It was a magical place. Magical, despite the muddy morass we often had to tramp through to get from exhibit to exhibit. Magical, despite the intense heat of every room, cubicle, bus. Yes, bus. Some of the exhibits were in buses, and they’d be sent around the country as-is. You had to make sure that the exhibits you wanted to see were “in station” at the time. Crowds and crowds of children all the time, laughing and yelling. But then that was true of every school, every neighbourhood, every maidan, so who cared?

We laughed and yelled some of the time, like when the Hall of Mirrors was in residence. But most of the time we were quiet. Spellbound.

I remember the first time I saw a room where everything worked via motion sensors. Doors opened as you approached them. Lights and fans came on as if by magic, some by sensing your presence, some requiring you to wave, some needing to be clapped into action.

I remember all that. Intensely. Even though it must have been 1967 or 1968.

In those days what mattered was access to viewing. When you have nothing else, then just being able to look is a luxury. Most of the time we looked at print and photo exhibits; occasionally we watched some film. Sometimes, if we were really lucky, we looked at physical objects, often built to smaller-than-life scale in order to conserve scarce capital. The motion-sensor room I described above was one of those “real” things, tiny, probably smaller than most urban bathrooms. But it felt huge. Because it lit your imagination.

I left India in 1980. At the time, I knew precisely one person who had a computer, Anu Thakur. He had a Commodore Pet, one of the earliest ones, he bought it in 1977, and he allowed me to touch it and feel it. He even taught me how to play Star Trek on it in 1978. He was an incredible guy, even had a Martin guitar and knew how to play flamenco style. I don’t know if he is still alive; if any of you who reads this knows him or his family, please pass on my regards.

The India I left in 1980 was one where you waited three years for a telephone line. A relatively thick line that came into the house and had a black Bakelite device with a rotary dial at the end of it. Remember them?

I couldn’t have studied Computer Science when I left India; the discipline had not yet made it on to institutional offers.

During the 1980s, the world of computing was in turmoil, with everything changing at a rate of knots. In the space of a decade, we learnt that “shifting tin” wasn’t the way forward, that hardware margins were history; that software and services, free at the time, were to be charged for; that character-based “dumb” terminals were to be replaced by the soon-to-be-ubiquitous graphical-user-interface PCs; that proprietary architectures were going to be supplanted by somewhat more open ones; that traditional “CODASYL” databases were soon to be replaced by relational ones. In the midst of all this, IBM and AT&T were considered too big to be allowed to continue the way they were, and faced significant antitrust moves against them. So IBM gave away the PC Operating System space (and found a grateful recipient in Microsoft) and AT&T freed up Unix.

That in turn helped the Indian software/services industry go ballistic; until then the barriers to entry to proprietary architectures were vast and unforgiving.

If all this wasn’t enough, during that same decade, the internet was quietly leaving defence and academia and proto-utopia to enter the mainstream, the beginnings of the web were being formed, and the first commercially usable transportable phones were showing up.

The 1980s were a decade of immense transition, setting the scene for what we see today. By the end of the decade the stirrings of democratisation were in place: the PC, the phone, Unix, and a move from hardware-only to hardware-and-software-and-services.More and more people had access to CPU cycles, to storage and to bandwidth and connectivity, a trend that continues to this date.

There was something else happening. In the past, telecommunications and computing were separate disciplines; and even within computing there were clear demarcations between general-purpose computing and embedded systems. As recently as a decade ago, when people were left with the “problem” of preparing for “Year 2000”, these were separate departments with independent plans.

All that was also changing. First, in the early 1990s, the distinction between computing and telephony began to blur; and within a decade, the separation between general-purpose computing and embedded systems became unsustainable.

[Of course, Shirky’s Law continued to show its power, and institutions continued to fight for the reason they came into being. But it’s a losing battle. And now it’s over, except for those who will not see.]

Today the democratisation of the dev is nearly complete. Linux, Apache. Mozilla, Android. Arduino, Raspberry Pi. Java, Ruby, Sinatra. Hadoop. GitHub. Storm, Cassandra, Kafka. Tessel.io, Pinocc.io. RepRap. These are all just examples, I could have filled this page if I wanted to. The individual names do not matter. What matters is the principle, that barriers to entry have come down sharply, and now anyone can develop software. For any market. Working on (almost) any device. With access to low cost tin and wire and pipe. And distribution.

Which is why I am so very excited by the announcement of the Salesforce $1m hackathon.

By now most of you know I work for Salesforce. It’s an amazing company, and one of the most amazing things about it is the platform at its core: what it is, what it represents; the sheer scale of the developer community around it; the number of apps built by customers; the size and vibrancy of the partner and ISV community; the smarts at the heart of its multitenant architecture; the daily transaction volume. Every way I look at it, the platform is something else. Incredible.

Now, with the hackathon coming up, I can see that many many more people will learn more about it and empower themselves to change the world where it means something to them. For nonprofits. In health, education and welfare. Affecting industry and logistics and distribution. In retailing, sales and marketing. Across the board.

Because it is now possible. More posts to follow as the stories develop.

 

 

[Note: This is a follow-up to my post yesterday on silos and streams and flows.]

Walmart changed how people thought about “bricks and mortar” retailing by connecting all their operating units together; their ability to track inventory and sales was remarkable as a result; in some ways, they had begun the journey of converting their stocks into flows, long before anyone else in their sector thought about it.

Amazon changed how people thought about “clicks” retailing by extending the edge of their distribution network to the home, with consequent effects on warehousing and inventory management. One book to one address rather than books in volume to a distribution outlet when stocks dropped below preset reorder levels.

Facebook came along and changed how people thought about all this by making the individual the centre of the distribution network, with recommendations streaming from individuals and streaming to individuals.

I’ve just chosen a few well-known examples; in truth, as part of the welter of innovation let loose by digital infrastructure, thousands of people have been transforming the way things are conceived, made, bought, sold, disposed of, and they continue to do so every day.

When you can connect things up, you can also find new ways of combining the things that are connected.

• Every time you use a map on a phone you’re combining your location with information about that location, usually drawn from some remote service via the public internet, the cloud. [An aside. None of this would be possible except for the internet, GPS and mobile telephony. Three technologies with deep military origins that were later made available to non-military people worldwide].
• The whole idea behind mash-ups is that you create value by connecting two things that were historically disparate in the analog world, and are now combinable in a digital world. Maps were just one of the earliest examples.
• One way of looking at augmented reality is that you’re taking something physical and overlaying it with something digital, drawn from the cloud.
• Many of the big data examples I see are really about rows and not columns; rows of data taken from different datasets and combined using a data element common to the different datasets.
• Even 3D printing is about combining materials in a standardised way to create standard components.

Talking about 3D printing: I had the opportunity to muse about how it will change the world of manufacturing, and wrote a brief essay for Scientific American on it. Read it and let me know what you think.

Which reminds me. I continue to be amazed at daily events in the world of 3D printing. It was only a matter of time before printing pizza was going to be possible; food printing is serious business now. I love the idea of using waste materials to make 3D printers. And then augmenting that idea by using recycled plastic to create the raw material for printing is pure genius. Building a “body on a chip” in order to test vaccines gets very interesting; maybe someday soon we will print simple physical avatars of ourselves just to test for allergies.

When things are connected, and especially when the connected things are expressible in mathematical form, combining is an essential component of the creative process.

Exciting times. I continue to be glad to be alive today. Despite so many things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silos. They’ve been around for years, millennia even; evidence of silos can be found in Tel Staf, c.5200-4700 BC. Storehouses of valuable produce, protecting and enhancing that value, connected into the supply and demand rituals of local markets.

 

 

They’re still around, but now they’re crumbling and decaying, with rats fighting over the grain that left’s behind. Largely empty, forgotten and forlorn, serving very little purpose other than to signal their obsolescence.

And I’m not just talking about grain silos.

 

There was a time when the post, the telegraph and the telephone formed separate and successful silos. Each to its own. And as they grew up, helped by the protection provided them through monopoly structures, they lived happily together in an even bigger silo called telecommunications.

There was a time when the computer and its peripherals and software and services formed separate and successful silos, each to its own. And they too grew up in holy and proprietary ways, making sure that customers had splendid isolation in the name of choice. And all was well.

 

There was a time when there were even more silos. If your computer wasn’t “general purpose” then you were allowed to build yourself a whole other silo, called embedded systems. And everyone stayed within their silos and honed their skills and built up their markets and never talked to anyone else.

Unlike grain silos, you couldn’t just transport information from one silo to another that easily; it required specialist skills and a lot of time and a lot of expense. Which kept some people very happy and a lot of people very poor. Maybe not that different from grain silos after all.

 

Those fairy tales are over. Now we have convergence. Actually we’ve had it for decades, but it’s all becoming more affordable and more visible and more useful.

We have a number of cats at home. Three, to be precise. They’re wonderful creatures.

Two of them, Mudpie and Midnight, are sisters. They’ve been with us for over a decade; we took them over from friends who were emigrating, so they’re really old.

 

So we wanted to have a younger one as well, to prepare for days to come we’d rather not think about.

Tiger. He was great. But one day he went missing, never to be seen again.

Some time later Lily joined our household.

She’s still in charge. Has us eating out of her hand, and she even keeps Mudpie and Midnight in check. Occasionally bullies them, until they realise they’re wiser than she is.

Convergence has affected our cats’ lives. They’ve been chipped. Now they and only they can use the cat flaps to enter our house. No more late-night raids from the neighbouring marauders, unwelcome visitors for nigh on a decade. And if I wanted to, I could set different rules for each cat. Even track where each cat was, and where it went the previous night. All our cats are outdoor cats, still keeping their mouser instincts honed, often bringing in rabbits and birds as well. Most of the time it’s okay; occasionally, when said mouse or rabbit or bird is alive, unharmed and running/flying/hopping freely around in the house, it makes for an interesting half an hour or so.

Lily, the youngest, is part of the iPad generation:

Yes, as the saying goes, there’s an app for that. You can get apps for kittens to play with.

Actually it’s not just kittens. There’s an app for everything.

And everything is connected.

All the time.

Everywhere.

[Pedants will write in and tell me that everyone is not connected, that there is a digital divide, that there are many parts of the world where this is just not true. And I will agree with them. And yet.  Please just go to Mumbai or Beijing or Nairobi and look around you and realise the future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.]

This interconnectedness and smart-phone-ness and app-ness of everyone and everything is blurring the lines between telecoms and general-purpose IT and embedded systems, bringing us a world of opportunity we could only dream of not that long ago.

Soon we will be able to say “If the doorbell rings and if the only person in the house is my aged hard-of-hearing aunt, then please switch on the light near the flat-screen TV in the living room because she doesn’t like using the computer to watch television, she’s old fashioned that way; but before you do that check if the person ringing the doorbell is that pesky brush salesman; if it is he, then don’t disturb my aunt, just let the Alsatian next door know that his favourite trouser leg, still attached to its human owner, is back in town.”

We live in exciting times. Silos have broken down.

Everything that’s connected is capable of sharing streams of information about state and status, accompanied by rich metadata to provide context. We’ve been able to do all this before, but not for everything and not instantly.

The instant bit changes everything. There are so many things we do that are based on information not being real-time. We rely on historical stocks of information because we’ve not been able to rely on anything else.

Like censuses. Remember them? As we’ve moved from millions of people to billions of people, they’ve become harder to do, more expensive, less accurate and very very time-consuming….. as long as the way we did them was the time-honoured way.

But some time-honoured ways are out of time and no longer deserving of honour. At a level of abstraction, the LIBOR scandal is a classic consequence of using a “stocks” process rather than a “flows” process.

There are LIBORs everywhere. The way we value things; the way we count things; the way we sound out opinions; the way we measure things ….. we’ve had to put up with taking samples of information and then extrapolating the samples according to some convention or another. Much of the information we see and use from traditional sources can be characterised as low-frequency snapshots of discrete samples aggregated and represented according to some agreed convention or other.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Now terms like real-time and all and continuous can be used without sounding like hyperbole. No more samples, no more extrapolation, no more conventional representations. Just the facts.

A whole new way of looking at information.  Information that emanates from everything and everyone, in a world where everything and everyone can “publish” and “subscribe”.

Information that comes as a live, “real-time” stream, as a series of streams; streams that get aggregated, filtered, personalised; streams that get aggregated, trended, analysed and projected; streams that help tell the past, the present and the future of  many small yet important things. Things that affect our health, our education, our welfare.

The technology architectures that have emerged over the past decade or so are built for this new paradigm, one of streams and filters and drains; one where there is no longer any difference between telecoms and IT and embedded systems; one where information comes from subscribing to flows and gaining insights from those flows, using personally chosen filters to make every firehose look like a set of comprehensible capillaries.

New paradigms come with new problems. The debates we continue to have about identity and intellectual property and the internet.

Subsidiary debates about privacy and confidentiality and sharing and anonymity and censorship and all the regulation those things bring with them, often creating new forms of trade protectionism as barriers get drawn on political lines. These debates have been going on for some time now. And in a John Lennon kind of way, life has carried on while we’ve been busy making noise about all this.

And life will carry on.

This new interconnected always-on publish-subscribe streams-and-filters-and-drains world is on us.

The silo was the symbol of stocks. The stream is the symbol of flows.

The stream is where some people live, and where more join every day. Tools continue to emerge, tools that help us harness the stream and navigate it. Tools to provide context; tools to filter; tools to visualise; to personalise; to aggregate; to imbue with enhanced meaning; to analyse; to project, forwards and backwards in time; to move, in geography and in culture.

The stream is here to stay. And I for one am excited.

 

“I don’t know where that leaves you, but you’re still deceased as far as the law is concerned.”

You couldn’t make it up. A man disappears in 1986; is declared legally dead in 1994; reappears in 2005. And the judge, calling it a “strange, strange situation”, found that death rulings cannot be overturned after three years.   There’s no more raising Lazarus from the dead, not with today’s Pharisees. Especially if you’ve been dead three years or more.

Sometimes the problem is not with returning from the dead, there’s a more fundamental issue at stake. In some places it’s illegal to die. Yup, death is prohibited.

A few years ago, we went to Aiguebelle for our summer vacation, far from the madding crowd. And the nearest town was Le Lavandou. Which you could get to on the “road train” pictured above. And so we did. While we were there, I looked up Wikipedia to learn more about the place. It turned out that A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square was written in a bar there.

It also turns out that it’s illegal to die there. The mayor called it “absurd… to counter an absurd situation”.

Le Lavandou’s not alone. Apparently the Greeks of Delos beat them to it by about 2500 years, and there have been many others since.

Not being allowed to die. Once dead, not be allowed to come back. Predictable phenomena in a world of letter rather than spirit, a topic I’ve had the opportunity to delve into time and time again. Some decades ago, as part of my investigations, I was pointed towards the works of Michael Polanyi in this regard, particularly in the context of things tacit and things explicit. His “we can know more than we can tell” mantra resonated with me, and helped me understand something about the challenges of formulating workable law in any sphere.

Influenced by my upbringing (Brahmin family, Jesuit schooling and university, all in cosmopolitan Calcutta) and by my teenage reading habits (which included a healthy dose of Asimov, not just the fashionable Foundation series, but, more relevant to this context, the Robot series), I had become a firm believer in spirit-not-letter, that the intent of the law or principle or guidance was what really mattered.

Asimov believed that we all needed to understand why the spirit-versus-letter argument was going to become more and more important, particularly as we moved towards a posthuman society. It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry. Robots can do “letter” with their eyes closed. But spirit? That’s a whole ‘nother deal. [Incidentally, if you’re interested in this topic, you should go read Sage Leslie-McCarthy’s paper on Asimov’s Posthuman Pharisees; it is excellent].

Polanyi believed that our tacit dimension included tradition, inherited practices, implied values and prejudgments. We live in a time of intense change, and often we throw much of this to the four winds in the name of progress. But we have to be careful. Amidst all the bathwater of tradition there’s a baby that may be worth keeping.

Implied values.

Some of those implied values are part of what makes us us.

That’s what I believe George VI was referring to when he said:

Sometimes, we behave “in a way which would not do if generally adopted“. It is something that every one of us is capable of, something we need to watch for.

So I get concerned when Stuart Broad doesn’t walk, deciding that the letter of the law had suddenly become more important than the spirit. In cricket, there is nothing more important than spirit.

It’s not just in cricket. Spirit matters.

Throughout the Cold War, there appeared to be a tacit rule that spies did what they did as part of statecraft while carefully avoiding any accusation of spying on commercial grounds alone. That rule is now being declared irrelevant and unworkable.

There used to be an unwritten rule that governments didn’t spy on their own citizens unless they had demonstrable cause.

There used to be an unwritten rule that the role of elected officials was to serve their electors, to “govern”; to debate law while it was formed, then to uphold law once it was passed; where law needed changing, to use the process of law to change the law.

These unwritten, tacit rules were part of the fabric of society. An “understanding of things we knew but could not tell”, formed over millennia.

We are moving headlong into a society where we have to learn to teach robots to be human as they drive cars and operate drones and perform surgery and make our hearts work.

We need to be careful.

Because we could also be moving headlong into a society where we forget how to be human, and become primitive robots instead, unable to tell spirit from letter.

Spirit matters.

 

 

Each year I try and spend a night out underneath the stars to try and experience, in a tiny and vicarious way, what the homeless face. It’s for a charity close to my heart, Action for Children. The event is called Byte Night, and this Friday hundreds of people all over the country will join us in raising money for Action for Children.

Last year was an interesting experience. It rained. And rained. And rained. The non-swimmer in me wasn’t perturbed, but another hour or two and I may have been.

This year, sadly, I won’t be amongst the sleepers-out this Friday, wet or not. I’m unavoidably away on business, and we haven’t yet invented the transport that can get me back from the US on time.

But that doesn’t stop my colleagues from spending Friday night on the banks of the Thames. It doesn’t stop them hoping and praying that the weather is somewhat better than last year.

It doesn’t stop me donating to the cause.

I hope it doesn’t stop you. Please give. And give generously.

Here’s the link.

Thank you.

Coda: I will, in conjunction with some of my colleagues, be running some other events this year in order to augment what we raise for this. Watch this space.