Reading 05: What's Next

The success of Paul Graham and other hacker type startups during this first part of the digital age says about our society what people have argued about liberal, democratic societies for generations. These peoples’ success is a result of the free society they live in that not alone allowed them to pursue a new, unproven interest, but also allowed the marketplace to determine if those interests were worthwhile. This is obviously preferable to a society where the government tells you where you must apply your hacker skills or what products you are allowed to create with them. Moving forward, our society should continue to engage with these entrepreneurs and provide them a platform to keep creating because that is how progress works. Additionally, in the globalized economy, our society’s success will depend on breeding and sustaining hacker entrepreneurs because technological talent will begin to crop up all over the world and day-to-day programming jobs here will begin to be outsourced to cheaper markets. In the end, we will only be as successful as the people we cultivate to be creative in this global tech market.

As for the next big thing, I agree with Paul Graham that the computing pendulum is shifting back towards centralized processing. In fact, this was a fun discussion we had in Dr. Thain’s cloud computing course last semester. We traced the evolution from mainframe computers to personal desktops now to “cloud computing” as the tendency for technology to sway between centralized and distributed computing. However, I think Paul Graham misses something important about the reason we see the tech sector moving back towards centralized computing. It is the reason that computing originally had to move from a centralized to distributed environment and it’s not really driven by the ease of writing or using software. Centralized mainframe computing was outpaced because we didn’t have the network capacity to support the growing number of users who wanted access to computers. It became more feasible to give everyone their own computer than to create infrastructure for everyone to use the same computer (assuming, even, that single computer could keep up). So now as Graham describes throughout The Road Ahead that everything is moving to the web and users will do everything on someone else’s computers I agree with him, but it’s not primarily reliant on his argument that web based software is easier to write. “The Road Ahead” will be web based if the networks allow it to be. In my Raspberry Pi presentation at the start of the semester, I described that my dream (if I ever got some actual free time) would be to write software, a kind of network interpretative OS, that allows me to just have a network enabled screen-the Pi- that I can stream all of my content to and would be designed to give laptop and mobile users the experiences they previously had with the same data. I don’t want people to have to buy computers anymore. I think network speed and load has increased and will continue increasing to the point where you can essentially host a remote computer and stream an image of it to a screen. We can already do high volume, high load streaming with video per Netflix. And as ISPs continue to provide better networks, this too should be possible.

A final note on Graham’s assertion that tech should increase the wealth gap, which we discussed in class. I thought more about this as we discussed job automation in our Ethics course this week. The job automation readings and discussion made clear to me that in the pursuit of automating all jobs, we are going to automate the simple ones first and this will basically rail road the middle and lower classes economically. Graham demonstrates a similar lack of perspective when he argues for technology to increase the wealth gap. He isn’t thinking about all the people who couldn’t, even if they wanted to, get into the tech industry and get rich. There is a nontrivial population in this country who faces such large barriers to entry that they will never have the opportunity to get into tech. This is the same population we are going to run over as we pursue an automated society, and as hackers who seek to change the world and potentially make profit as a result, we are beholden to keeping this group in mind.