Newton Revised: When “Acceleration of Change” Equals “At Rest”

Since Toffler coined “Future Shock,” techno-change has continued to accelerate and it’s beginning to get a little scary now. I keep feeling that some time soon the rate has to hit the wall, go into clipping if you know what I mean, generating some truly massive cyber-distortion. It just can’t keep speeding up like this!

Indulge in my sci-fi hyperchange fantasy for a second: by Tuesday, April 23, 2013 you’ll be upgrading your telephone twice a day, your computer every hour, and your network system hardware every two hours. Tomorrow, Wednesday, April 24, 2013, that will shorten by about 6%! Whew! You’ll need 2.12 new telephones, 25.4 new computers and 12.7 new networks! And that’s just for tomorrow! Thursday will be even worse (2.24 phones, etc.)!!! What a mountain to climb! I get tired just imagining this much change! (Excuse me, the phone guy is at the door again. OK, I’m back, where was I?)

While such a fantasy is obviously unrealistic, it highlights the insight that rapid change is now an ongoing, static condition, and that the current rate of change is certainly not going to decrease. We no longer “make” a change which then becomes status quo for a while – we are now so busy “changing” that we have trouble just “doing” for any reasonable length of time (Whoops, the new network team is here – just a sec, I’ll be right back, just hold the, sorry about that, a slight formatting problem, uh-oh I see they’re changing the default fonts on me again)

You get the picture. The pot has begun to boil, and we’re the Easter Eggs, bouncing around like mad in the roiling water. Problem is, the pot isn’t going to stop boiling, ever again. We’re just getting harder and harder boiled, for the rest of time! Sumbich!

“One Size Fits All” Revisited in the Time Domain

As I said in an article last November, computers promise and threaten to become a “one-size-fits-all” kind of Wondertool®, barely adequate for all and ideal for none. This is bad enough by itself, but when you dial in the time dimension, what was “one-size-fits-all” becomes “one-size-fits-all-time!” Not only barely adequate for any and ideal for none, but never right now! It’ll work really well next week or maybe last week. In a month it’ll be really cool, but by then our size will have changed. It was perfect the week after we were!

Upgrades and Time Diffusion

“You no longer buy a computer, you subscribe to it.” - anonymous

Manufacturer/publishers tend to upgrade their products several times a year. This is occasionally manifested as hardware changes, but mostly as software modifications. Those changes include new features, the deletions of old features, changes in compatibility to work with other newer computers, systems and other software, and a loss in backward compatibility (the ability to work with older computers, systems and software).

Now, when you buy a computer ‘n software for the first time, everything is pretty compatible. You start with the current version of everything that you buy. Your time diffusion is zero.

Over time (say, two years – this is happening fast!), all of that stuff becomes obsolete or at the very least out of date (meaning several newer versions have been released by the various manufacturers). This isn’t necessarily a big deal for you. Your stuff still works fine, you’re still getting the hang of it, and so on. Stuff you use a lot and are really into, you’ve probably upgraded, maybe even three or four times. Some stuff you just don’t want to change, some stuff is too expensive for you to upgrade, and some stuff you don’t use enough to justify upgrading. Meanwhile, you’ve bought some new stuff, expanded your range, modified things on the basis of your growing experience. So, two years later, you now have a time diffusion of approximately four generations of cyber-technology. Sad personal experience suggests that computer systems with a four-generation diffusion begin to not work so well. Things get buggy, system anomalies appear, some stuff begins to run slow, some stuff won’t run with other stuff, certain kinds of crashes become a daily affliction like a nervous tic, etc. The greater the time diffusion, the worse the computer runs.

Now, the potential for incompatibilities increases as the square of the number of generations. Over ten years, you will have at least a twenty-generation span, so what was a predisposition of the four-generation system to misbehave becomes a statistical certainty for the 20-generation system. This has significant implications if you plan to be doing this in ten years, or were, like me, doing it ten years ago!

At the center of this is the computer operating system, the central cyber-neurological organization of any computer. Now, operating systems are (a) less than perfect, (b) absolutely essential and (c) under constant and intense development. When you upgrade your operating system, you are in fact giving your computer a serious frontal lobotomy plus electro-shock therapy. Your CPU will end up, well, different somehow. While some irritating and really stupid quirks will be gone, other very lovable facets will probably be gone as well. More important, some of the tricks that the computer used to do with ease (such as running Macrosloth Weird Version 1.02) just aren’t going to happen anymore. Your house of cards has begun to collapse, and you have some work to do to get another house of cards on-line, all the while taking time away from your real work, which is making music.