Edward Jordon speaking at the RCC 2013: "Past, Present and Future"

As most of our readers already know, one of the speakers of the recent finals of the Russian Code Cup was Edward Yourdon.



In this post we would like to give a somewhat loose presentation of the main ideas that Mr. Jordon spoke about in his speech at the RCC.

Fathers and Sons

In the days of my youth, computer technology was still very far from ordinary people. Therefore, when about 50 years ago I told my mother that my first job in life would be programming, she decided that this was somehow related to underwear (software -> underwear). Of course, she dreamed not of such a future for me. She hoped that I would become an electrical engineer, just like my father. In general, my mother very vaguely imagined my future profession. My father frankly laughed at me and said that systems built in binary language are not needed by anyone.

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Perhaps your parents told you: “Oh, my son is a genius! My son will achieve great success! My son created his own company. ” Surely they respect your hobby for information technology. My parents were ashamed of me. Probably, when your children tell you that they have decided to become programmers, you will be proud and admire them.

Right moment

Of course, it is very important to choose the right time. There are many examples when a product was launched to the market too soon or too late. For example, Newton's wearable computer from Apple. Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card wrote a wonderful book in which he suggested that it would be if Columbus discovered America 50 years later. Perhaps by that time the Incas would begin to process iron and invented gunpowder. And then the story would have gone a completely different way. However, to understand the correctness of the chosen moment, it is necessary to understand well not only the current situation, but also to know the past. Alas, our youth know very little even about the near historical period. First-year students have heard about the country of Russia, but do not know about the Soviet Union. Not to mention many other things and delusions .

Performance

I hope you recognize this person: this is Gordon Moore in 1970, 5 years after the publication of the article in which he formulated his famous forecast, known today as Moore's Law. Many of you are so young that the technologies of that time seem extremely primitive to you. You simply do not think about them, and for many young IT specialists Moore’s law seems to be something archaic. Let me dissuade you. For this, I will give a fresh example. Most recently, Apple announced a new iPhone model:







At the presentation, one of the bosses Apple mentioned that this smartphone is 40 times more powerful than the 2007 model, although they are similar:







But only 6 years have passed since the release of the third iPhone. I will give one more example of the relevance of Moore's law. For example, you are offered a new car, which has 10% higher speed and efficiency, and 10% lower cost. You would think that the difference is small. Now, if you were offered a car that is 10 times faster and more economical, and 10 times cheaper, then you would be really interested. So Moore just predicted a 10-100 fold increase in productivity, which we have long been used to. However, in his article, Gordon Moore wrote that his forecast is relevant only for the next 10 years, after which there will be no such increase in productivity. Therefore, in 1973-74, my friends and I were very worried that stagnation in the development of the market was approaching. Soon Moore said that, perhaps, his forecast will be relevant for another 10 years, until 1985. In 1983-84, we again began to cherish, and again Moore pleased us: “Until 1995, you can not worry. Will act the law. " What I am leading to: not so long ago, Intel announced that Moore's law would be relevant until 2015. And there is a bold opinion that even before 2029. True, by that time, you will probably be more worried about the availability of work for your children, and not for yourself. Strangely enough, Moore's law operates not only with respect to computing power, but also a number of other important parameters: cost, size, capacity, network bandwidth.



Imagine that your computer has become 100 times more powerful. So it will be in 10 years. Why do we need it, because for 99% of everyday tasks we have enough power today. The reason given by this person:







This is the author of the language Algol Nicholas Wirth in 1969. Wirth formulated a rule that says: " Software becomes slower much faster than iron becomes more powerful ." Remarkable law, agree. A vivid example confirming its justice is the first man-made object that left the limits of the Solar System - Voyager-1.







Only three weeks ago, NASA officially confirmed that Voyager had entered the interstellar space. But few people remember that it was made in 1977. And today the weakest of the iPhones available for sale is 240,000 times more powerful than the computer installed in Voyager. The Voyager project manager said this very well: “ These younger engineers (she, of course, meant you, not me) can write a lot of lousy, sloppy code, and that doesn't matter. But this computer with its limited capabilities requires maximum accuracy and a good programming strategy. ” NASA chose a programmer for a very long time, and eventually settled on a 77-year-old engineer who had already retired.

Cost price

At the same time, modern mass production very rarely has any serious limitations in terms of computing power. And there is a feeling that if we continue to increase the performance of computing power by 10%, this is enough for future applications. But there is a possibility that due to the sharp increase in computing power, new, much more demanding business models will emerge. As you remember, Steve Jobs was a humanitarian in his education and even the university was not finished. However, it was his business models that brought Apple worldwide popularity. For example, until recently the recording industry sold music by albums (singles do not count). The “charm” of the albums is that for the sake of one good song you had to pay for 10 more vile tracks. It was Steve Jobs who first suggested selling individual tracks in iTunes for 99 cents. And in the near future, the reduction of their value is announced almost to 1 cent.



I must say that in professional and scientific fields there is still a shortage of computing power: in medical and genetic research, the creation of artificial intelligence, weather forecasting, and so on. And if for office and everyday use the capacities of modern computers are already abundant enough, in the sphere of super-computer calculations the requirements for the growth of capacities are very high.



As you remember, Moore’s law says that computers are constantly becoming cheaper, and we can also observe the correctness of this thesis. Reducing the cost of computers leads to their increasing distribution. A computer for $ 1000 in five years is already worth only $ 100. It is projected that by 2014 or 2015 there will be about 2 billion personal computers. And projects for the release of 100-dollar computers only spur this trend. For example, the project of Professor Negroponte from MIT, called OLPC . "Every child has a laptop." The idea of ​​the project is to create a laptop with a cost of $ 100 (so far it turns out $ 188 ). Despite the fact that this project can not be called completely successful, however, it stimulated a large amount of research, conferences, and publication of articles. Progress has already made some of these works irrelevant, because now the dominant point of view is that smartphones and tablets, and not laptops, will be the most used devices. It is the smartphone market that shows fantastic growth:

Year	amount
1980	11.2 million
2002	1 billion
2006	2.4 billion
2007	3 billion
2009	4.1 billion
2014	Compared with the human population

In 1980, there were 11 million telephones in the world. Next year, the number of phones will exceed the number of people on the planet . In Russia, the phone is already 1.8 times more than the population. Why it happens? I think the answer is obvious. Imagine that you offer your teenage child a new car or a sixth-generation iPhone. What will he choose? I think the iPhone. It is possible that the further cheapening of electronics will lead in the future almost to the free distribution of gadgets.



In conclusion, the topic of cost I want to note that cheap computers will be used in developed and poor countries. Only the practice of use will be very different. Probably, they will be mainly used not for entertainment, but for serious tasks. For example, to monitor the state of health, making money. Perhaps the emergence of the concept of a disposable computer. Remember, there used to be disposable cameras?



Another consequence of the reduction in price may be "smart" packaging. Or the emergence of devices that after a short period of operation will self-destruct.



Recently, I was at a conference where the head of the Disney corporation was also present. He told that all parents who come with children, they give free teddy bears. Despite the abundance of electronic toys, children grab the bears and do not part with them. Sensors are built into each bear, and when the child passes by the next tray, the toy begins to whisper the child in his ear: “Ask the parents for cotton candy. Ask for it, ask for it. ” Of course, over time, the bear’s battery sits down and is thrown away, but the growth in sales from the implementation of this solution compensates for all the expenses.



Previously, it was difficult to imagine why, for example, you need a few laptops. Now many people buy several phones, for a different mood. Today, few people come to mind somehow tightly control the use of electronic devices. When I was a graduate student, Xeroxes were so expensive that we were not allowed to approach them, only specially trained staff worked with them. What can we say about computers in those days. The cost and scarcity of electronic devices spawned the creation of rigid mechanisms for access to them. Now this is no longer.

Minimization

Gradually, electronics are becoming smaller in size. Computers have gone from multi-ton mainframes to smartphones. The iPhone 5 has become 25% thinner than the iPhone 4. The reduction of technological processes will in the near future create nanodevices that can be used as medical probes and spyware robots. And how long have devices like Google-glass seemed fantastic?



Due to productivity growth, serious innovations in the field of interfaces are expected in the future, including: rejection of mechanical keyboards, voice control, the use of wearable sensors and sensors , algorithms for “ anticipating ” user actions, and so on.

Future

There is a beaten cliche, according to which fiction writers predict our future. 11 years ago, Michael Crichton wrote the novel "The Sacrifice" (Prey). It tells about self-replicating nanoparticles. I recommend reading. We are already seeing a similar trend in data storage. The question arises: what to do with this increasing amount of information? Almost the lion's share of all recorded and stored data is photo and video information, primarily from various tracking systems. A growing number of cameras and satellites, increasing resolution of video sensors and the average frame rate pose new challenges for developers in the areas of data mining, analysis, visualization and processing.



Biometric information can be a new type of data that will begin to be recorded and stored around the world, especially with a view to “security” and “fight against terrorism”: pulse and respiration rates, muscle tone, and so on.



The next challenge is the growth of traffic in information networks. Bell Labs' Gerry Butters (Gerry Butters) formulated an empirical law, according to which the amount of data transmitted over optical fiber doubles every 9 months. While, according to Nielsen’s law, network capacity doubles only every 21 months. In 2010, Cisco predicted a fourfold increase in traffic on the Internet by 2014, mainly due to video transmission. Although all such predictions in any case depend on the bandwidth of the network infrastructure.



It is quite natural to expect the expansion of already existing trends and technologies: video streaming, RFID tags, mobility, miniaturization and interactivity of devices.



But let's digress from the hardware and think: what if all further progress suddenly depends only on the improvement of the software? Unfortunately, most programmers continue to write lousy enough code. And the vast majority of corporations have not learned how to correctly manage projects. Of course, optimists will say that after all the software has become better, it’s just that now it has to solve more problems, and they are much bigger. But it seems to me that for this we use the minimum amount of hardware resources available to us. We can make greater use of the possibilities of virtualization, better optimize the code. At the moment there are a huge number of devices that simply idle, because they are reserved for any one task.



About 15 years ago, we had high hopes for Palm Computing, which no longer exists today. Apparently, a similar fate awaits the BlackBerry. About the Palm company it was often said that the success of their PDA lies in the fact that they employed 40 thousand developers who wrote 10 thousand applications. Today this number seems ridiculous: a year after the release of the first iPhone, 100 thousand applications were written for it. Then there were 150 thousand of them. It is now more than 750 thousand, approaching a million. Perhaps this is one of the forms of Moore's law? Can 10 million applications be created in 5 years and 100 million in 10 years? Of course, if 100 million applications are written for the smartphone, no one will expect that they will all be “explosive”. There will be a small number of excellent, good, successful, and a huge amount of foolish. Only a tiny fraction of the applications available for download will gain commercial success. The vast majority of the rest are sold for several copies a year.



You ask, and who will write these 100 million applications? Maybe we will scrape up professional developers for 10 million applications, but not 100! But do you know which applications were the most successful in the 70s? Spreadsheets. And they were not invented by programmers at all. That is, in the future, perhaps, such “explosive” solutions will appear that will be invented by not ordinary professionals, but ordinary users. Although today the most popular and commercially successful mobile applications are games.

I would like to show you the results of one study :







Here are the most popular categories of applications in the mobile segment. As you can see, the first three places are occupied by entertainment applications. I must admit that at one time I did not guess that Google would have such popularity. I did not believe in Netscape Navigator. And today, I believe that in the future, revolutionary breakthroughs should be expected from collaboration applications, augmented reality applications and virtual worlds, location applications and assistant applications.

Social aspects

To begin, I would like to remind you of the three laws of Arthur Clarke.



The first. When a respected, but an elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. If he says that something is impossible, then he is most likely mistaken.



Second. The only way to open the borders of the possible is to move a little further than these borders into the territory of the impossible.



Third. Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.



Despite the above-mentioned maxim about predictions of the future by science fiction, many predictions and predictions on the subject of technology turn out to be amazingly erroneous. For example, in 1981 one little-known computer geek named Gates (his name is unlikely to remain in the history of mankind) at a conference said that 640 kilobytes of memory should be enough for anyone. Interestingly, Bill (he now seems to be called that way) now actively denies that he said that. The history of mankind is full of such absurd forecasts.



There is an opinion that any revolutionary technology does not just change the technological paradigm. It may irreversibly change the scientific and social status quo, and for this reason, it often encounters active resistance from governments, religions, societies and cultural traditions. Thomas Kahn wrote about this very well in his book , and Meg Whitman said that revolutionaries very often become what they struggle with. As examples of resistance to modern technology, you can cite such factors as:

• Resistance to user generated content
• Ban companies from blogging by their employees
• Rejection of web-based products.

This graph shows the typical stages of mastering new technologies, and not only computer ones. The author claims that the development takes up to 15 years. Although it should be noted that now the pace of technological progress is accelerating, which is reflected in the reduction of the period of full development. Also contributes to the active development of modern technology and the older generation . Here it is appropriate to bring the so-called Fubini law:



1) At first, people use technology to do familiar things faster.

2) Then gradually start using it to do something new.

3) New changes people's lifestyle and work.

4) New life styles and work change society

5) ... and finally change the technology.



Below you can see examples of the development of some technologies since 1900:







In the near future, representatives of the so-called Digital Native generation will go to universities, that is, those who were born already in the digital age. In their perception and behavior, they are very different from you , and even more so from me . For example, according to a study by Mary Meeker, 91% of mobile phone owners always keep them no more than a meter away, even when they sleep.



I would also like to mention several important trends in the influence of modern technologies on the learning process . Increasingly multiplayer online courses appear.

Finally

How do we predict the impact of technological progress on our near future? I am afraid that often we can make a forecast only after the release of a press release of another company. This is partly due to the careful preservation of secrets. For example, there is a forecast that by the end of the decade, “ UAVs ” will be on sale. And until now, few people thought about how this will change our cities, all sorts of business models in the urban environment and the behavior of citizens. Maybe they will start to drink more.

It is very difficult to analyze technologies and predict the consequences of their appearance.



In parting, I would like to quote words from one book:



"Every morning I get up to change the world ...

... and also a damn good time.

Although it is sometimes difficult to plan something in such conditions. ”



Based on the speech of Edward Yourdon at the RCC