The Age of Entanglement
The Bandwidth Bottleneck“When the world we have created is too complicated for our humble human brains, the nightmare scenario is not Skynet—the self-aware network declaring war on humanity—but messy systems so convoluted that nearly any glitch you can think of (and many you can’t) can and will happen.”
I wonder at what point technological possibility intersects with practical implementation, and where that fits in with current mainstream infatuations (e.g. virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, smart devices). For example, it may be possible in a lab to achieve the absurdly high amounts of continuous data collection and processing to coordinate self-driving cars on the road, but what about in the messy real world, where tunnels or weather might subtly degrade communications and ruins the whole thing, or some cars are operating different versions of proprietary software that glitch out when dealing with each other (quality debugging takes on a different dimension when gridlock that shuts down a city or people's lives are at stake). What if virtual reality becomes very easy to implement on an individual scale but just costs a HUGE amount of computing overhead/bandwidth and isn't really economically feasible for all the people on a network that want it?Internet companies are painfully aware that today's network is far from ready for the much-promised future of mobile high-definition video, autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, telepresence and interactive 3D virtual-reality gaming.
Behind all of this is the fact that these technological improvements are generally taking place on a backbone of assorted, cobbled together code, frameworks, and infrastructure that it was never designed for. AKA "lock in"
Where do all of you sit on the technological optimism spectrum? Are these issues just minor hurdles on the way to spaceships and unitards, or do you think humanity will hit a technological plateau (vs a continuing exponential curve) due to humanities own mental capacities? Any thoughts?Jaron Lanier wrote:The brittle character of mature computer programs can cause digital designs to get frozen into place by a process known as lock-in. This happens when many software programs are designed to work with an existing one. The process of significantly changing software in a situation in which a lot of other software is dependent on it is the hardest thing to do. So it almost never happens.