What's Next - the future with Wayne MacPhail

Thinking about the future. Imagining the future. Getting ready for the future.

Well, you know. The future comes. Like it or not.

If you ask me, it is the nature of life that what you think will happen does not happen. Something else happens.

"The future is here but it is unevenly distributed."
- William Gibson

"We drive into the future using only a rear view mirror."
Marshall MacLuhan

"The future does not extend the past." This sounds good but it is not really true. I would say that we never know what part of today will dominate our lives tomorrow. Or you could say that we never know what part of the past will extend to the future.

While we cannot predict the future we can influence it. And, I think that Wayne MacPhail's own experience is a good example of how this happens.

Wayne was one of the first people to ride the internet. As a staff writer at the Hamilton Spectator, he developed a series of articles on AIDS. They were a popular resource and Wayne was frequently asked to share them. That is, people kept asking him for the articles and they kept asking him for specific information that they contained. A victim of his own success and a programmer since grade 9, Wayne knew that there was an easier way to share his work. He eventually created a series of hyperlinks. (HTML - hypertext markup language). His six articles became 36 text files which became available on campuses and other places around the world.

This is a good example of how "the future happens." Someone takes pieces of present day technology and makes them into something that is much more than the parts.

Really, our current revolution in information and communication is no different from the revolution in transportation that happened in the middle of the 19th century. At least from my perspective, the invention of the steam engine and it's ability to do more work than animals and in more places than water power transformed the way people lived. The revolution in transportation came even further with the refined development of internal combustion and then the application of the assembly line to the manufacture of cars and trucks.

The cost of transportation plummeted time and again for decades.

Wayne MacPail Talked about a "trend to 0." That is, the cost of computing and the cost of communication is currently decreasing so quickly that, for all intents and purposes it begins to approach 0.

As a little look that might be around the corner, the city of San Francisco offers high speed - as in fibre optic high speed at 100 mbps - to some of it's public housing units. After attempts to blanket the city wity wi-fi failed, this solution was less expensive.

Interesting to note that Wayne mentioned Charles Babbage who invented an analytical engine called a "difference engine" in 1822. Babbage's engine used mechanical gears to calculate logarithmic tables. A working model was actually constructed in 1991 and it worked perfectly.

Aida Lovelace, a mathematician, actually created a programming language for Babbage's machine, though it did not actually exist.

Frankly, I'm not really sure what any of this means. I don't know what will come next but I love to see the new ideas that rise out of the muck. Those that fail are often more interesting than those that succeed. To this day, I love Apple's Newton.