Learning In an Industry That Never Sleeps

I hate computers. Actually, I really like computers and I hate that fact, because they are like these sense-less infants with insatiable appetites for knowledge and mobility. You can feed them all day long and into the night and they never stop growing. In fact, if you feed a baby it only ever has two arms at most with which to wield havoc on your life (though I know parents who might want to disagree with that.) But with a computer, you feed it and feed it and the next day it has ten arms reaching in every direction. This baby is no typical baby. And once your friends and family (and employer) catch a glimpse of this amazing baby they want to see it do trick and want you to raise one up for them, too. Pretty soon you find that you are doing all that you can to keep up with this monster of a baby as the world around you begs to see more tricks.

Like parents of human babies, you begin to realize that it takes far more than 9 to 5 to keep up with this toddler. You can’t sedate it or pawn it off on relatives or a sitter. Every day it is growing out of control and within a few days you catch yourself saying, “Where did that new appendage come from?” and now you have to quickly “master” the abilities of this growing baby, so you can remain the respectable teacher of it.

My baby’s most recent new appendages are PHP, Ajax, WPF/E, XAML, and SharePoint. I see these suckers reaching and grabbing and throwing and warbling every day. There are a countless number of fingers reaching everything within the grasp of my available time.
So I have decided to cut back. I am cutting back on sleep, personal time and most importantly anything else that may have critical importance to my life or career, as I get completely absorbed and enveloped in the weeds of this gigantic organic/dynamic playground. I have been trying to cut out frivolous stuff like eating and time in the bathroom (two things that are like a perpetual cycle unto each other) to make more time for baby, but I find I am getting weak fast, so I have to get back on the trough.

Back to Reality: I would give anything for this silent competitively growing tech-revolution to plane off and give the proverbial “parents” a little break, but I don’t see that happening. The fact is that we are on the very early upward trend of a massive technology parabola that only just started in the very late 1970s. Soon, meaning in my lifetime, there will be a nearly vertical adoption curve of growth and change around how we think about and live with technology (from the inevitable evaporation of the cube sitting on the floor called a computer – it will be completely integrated into other products and not be an end in itself, to the ways we interact with the request and delivery of information- no more keyboards, mice and monitors, but something altogether more intuitively integrated) and we will need new technology just to keep track of the old technology that just became outdated.

So, here is my prediction: Wetware is what is next. In 1997 I imagined I invented the term when I found myself thinking about the future interface between human biology and digital appendages. I think we will see the creation of wetware products that will help deliver stored and indexed information to us in a faster more intuitive manner. It will be like a Bluetooth device that attaches to our glasses and displays information related to as many human interactions as possible, automatically cross-referencing and indexing information in their contexts at an incredible rate. Kids will wear this stuff their entire lives and when they get old, everything they ever experienced will be available at their fingertips, sorted by statistical relevance by the age in which they found and reflected on it. Gone will be the days of getting old and forgetting stuff. Our “brain” will be managed externally. And big brother will pay big bucks to get a peak at your bit-matter ( not quite grey-matter.) Companies will specialize in helping sift through your digital preferences and help you articulate your opinion better than you could ever do. In fact, you won’t have to show up at the hardware store and ask for “one of those puddy slash tapey things that help the pipe stop leaking.” Your wetware will cross-reference “puddy-slash-tapey, pipe,leaking” with the product catalog of the store you walked into and ask for the right product by name, on your behalf. Business Intelligence will take on a whole new meaning and Marketing will be reduced to intense logarithmic calculations about the probability of your interest in their product rather than blanketing you with a shotgun blast of eye candy to try and get you to buy their products. This is how advertising dollars will be saved. You will volunteer your statistical interest via wetware, without you even knowing it, and the ad will move along to a slightly more likely candidate. Our time will be focused on things that seem to add value while the rest of the digital planet rolls forward on the boring details that we would never have even attempted to collate on our own.

Next blog entry: "How we will survive an energy crisis in the future when we let technology manage our preferences" or "How to grill a ham sandwhich"