Singularity: December 2007 Archives
Soon, vast data, intense processing, and rapid connections will accompany us everywhere, all the time. It will all be part of the Internet Cloud. Gone will be the concepts of work station, laptop vs desktop, screen and keyboard, and cables. These refer to transitory artifacts of the technical curve towards seamless, ubiquitous, pervasive computing.
Cloudware: Apps and services that once would have run on a desktop operating system now run in the cloud: the unbounded, ever-shifting, intangible collection of servers that make up the Internet. Go to Google Maps, Yahoo Mail, or MySpace — most of Web 2.0, in other words — and you're using cloudware. (In the enterprise market, it's called software as a service.)
The human mind cannot perceive a ratio of one billion. Let one million billions. Maybe what we can sort of perceive is that every 10 years, computer power increases a thousandfold. Though I doubt most people can imagine what that power increment would mean. Nor can they picture what new avenues will open up.
In 1957 ... there were fewer than 2,000 computers total, and they were essentially used to crunch numbers. They were huge, expensive, and unreliable; sometimes, they caught on fire. There was no word processing, no spreadsheets, no e-mail, and no Internet. Programs were written on punch cards or paper tape, and memory was measured in thousands of digits. ... Moore’s Law predicts that in fifty years, computers will be [correction: one million billion --ed.] times more powerful than they are today. I don’t think anyone has any idea of the fantastic emergent properties you get from a billion-times increase in computing power. ... But I can guarantee that it will be incredible, fantastic, and mind-blowing.
