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Helping Computers Help Themselves
Jim Posner writes "The IT world's heavy hitters--IBM, Sun, Microsoft, and HP--want computers to solve their own problems.....If you're being chased by a big snarling dog, you don't have to worry about adjusting your heart rate or releasing a precise amount of adrenaline. Your body automatically does it all, thanks to the autonomic nervous system, the master-control for involuntary functions from breathing and blood flow to salivation and digestion." I'd just be happy with a few intelligent daemons to watch my back, like when a program runs amuck and fills up the process list.
Not likely, at least not any time soon. This article is not really describing a new phenomenon. The basic trend is all computing is to start with something that does a simple task, but is terribly difficult to install and run, and slowly make it easier. You remove the points where the end-user has to interact with the system if those interactions could have been easily figured out by the computer. This kind of optimization has been going on since computers were born, but despite all the progress, the tech industry has done nothing but grow.
So Sun and IBM are turning their attention to some particular area that needs more optimizations... this just means that in ten years, there is going to be a higher level of abstraction with the same problems to solve. I'll have to figure out how to my new McDonalds chain can just plug some new computers into a wall and have their order menus popup instantly... great for productivity, great progress, but it hardly cuts into the demand for technically skilled people.
Of course, intuitively there must be some point where the optimizations made start cutting into jobs. My feeling though is that we are still working on some of the most basic problems of computing, and it will be quite a long time before we reach the peak of this curve. I mean, a big focus of the article is how to most efficiently get data out of databases! We all take for granted that this is (currently) a very tricky issue. Imagine looking back in twenty years though... it's easy to imagine that we'll laugh at having to think about such basic issues at all. "Configuring a network? Gimme a break, piece of cake! Connect some wires and you're done!" we'll say. And yet it's easy to imagine that despite having solved all of these problems, we will still be faced with a set of complicated issues of the day to solve to utilize these features. We're still working out how to move information around efficiently. And this is just a discussion about how to move information around efficiently. We're not even getting into applications and what to do with that information once you have it.
Then someone will write an article about how IBM is focusing on the problems of that day, and is going to make it easy to handle *that* level of abstraction. We'll read that configuring interactions between networks to transparently and securely utilize excess CPU in your neighborhood, or your city, is going to be a breeeze, and we'll have this discussion all over again...
Your body automatically does it all
If our bodies worked the way we wanted, things would be very different. First, you'd get a huge boost of adrenaline so you could outrun the dog. Also, although your heart would speed up, you'd have no risk of a heart attack or other complications from overexerting yourself. You wouldn't get tired. And you'd be equipped with built in weapons for annihilating hostile canines.
You'd also never have to worry about getting nervous trying to talk to that new cutie at work, acne wouldn't exist, and we all be our ideal weight.
Our bodies, at best, make fair attempts at adjusting to situations, but they blow it as often as they get it right. Frankly, if our computers become as reliable as our bodies, I'm going to invest in pencils.