The future is here - and it works

There is nothing very exciting about the sliver of silicon in a computer chip, the slab of coated aluminium in a hard disc or the strands of glass used in optical fibre. These basic components have become so commonplace that most of us long since learnt to take them for granted.

But something has been happening to the fundamental building blocks of the computing and networking age, along with the systems into which they are assembled. In short, the foundations upon which our technology-dependent culture are built look very different from the ones that existed when the worldwide web first brought connected computing to the masses a decade ago.

Part of this has to do with advances in hardware. Moore’s Law - which holds that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months - is the best-known expression of the pace of modern technological progress. But similar exponential rates of improvement have been working their magic on the amount of information that can be stored on a square inch of disc space and the rate at which bits of data can be poured down an optical fibre.

It is a common human mistake to underestimate the power of such exponential forces: we tend to project the past on to the future. Yet accelerating rates of change are bringing the future racing towards us. In the 12 years it took to sequence the human genome, the cost of reading a single DNA base pair collapsed from $10 to one-10th of a cent, according to the futurologist Ray Kurzweil: the job would simply have not been possible otherwise. Had it been around as recently as 1998, the latest Xbox games console, available for $399, would have ranked as the world’s fastest supercomputer.

Other advances have come in the equally boring-sounding area of standardisation. Imagine if most of the basic materials used in the construction of a house, right down to the bolts, were designed and made just for that building: that was the state of the technology world when the internet was first built. Today, many of those pieces have been standardised.

The same force has been at work in software. Rather than write specialised code for every task, something that made software engineering more akin to a mediaeval craft, standards such as XML have made today’s software much more interchangeable. It is now becoming possible to pick and choose between existing software "components", which greatly increases the productivity of software creation.

Google is a creature of this new era of cheap computing. The genius of its technology lies as much in the basic hardware as its fancy search algorithms. It builds its own computers, assembling the machines from standard components and hooking them together to create the most "scalable" electronic brain in the world.

What does this new world of low-cost, standardised, interchangeable technology mean for everyday life? The accelerating rate of progress - that is, the collapsing cost of computing and communication - promises to make information processing ubiquitous. Cheap sensors embedded in everything, connected wirelessly, will create a vast, distributed electronic "brain": suddenly, such visions do not seem so outlandish. With the price of radio frequency identification chips falling fast, the first pieces of this pervasive new network are starting to fall into place.

The powerful and largely invisible computing base that has crept up on us unawares is already making itself felt in daily life. As John Gage, chief researcher at Sun Microsystems, puts it, it has the power to surprise you with the things that are right in front of your face.

It is one thing to know that the cost of storing electronic data has fallen so far that anything you ever communicate again in your life can be stored forever. But it is quite another to understand the implications of this: it takes something like a White House scandal over electronic eavesdropping for the reality to sink in.

It is in the nature of surprises that no one can predict where the next one will come from. But there is no doubt that the new computing base now underpinning every aspect of our world will change the way we live sooner than most people think.

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