from a budding post-biologist... check your fears at the door

Well, I probably won't live long enough, but I still love to play in this sandbox...

I hope you've come across the book "The Coming Singularity" by Ray Kurzweil or have checked out his Singularity University. Kurzweil speculates on a not-so-distant moment in time when the growing rate of technological change transitions from its already step slope to vertical status, representing infinite change, and therefore defines a singularity (i.e., a single point when you look downwards).

A natural (sic) consequence of this event, or the time leading up to it, is (speculated) that we'll start replacing our squishier organic body components with more advanced functional equivalents. The motivation will come from the reality that computers will far exceed our brains in computing power in many ways, leaving us with a sink or swim scenario. Moving to this "post-biological" phase will be necessary in order to keep up with this next order of knowledge and simultaneously benefit from it.

So, as a spectator, the most fascinating part of this is how people might react to this pending reality. People will understandably picture Terminator robots. That's inevitable and unfortunate.

But it ain't going to be that way. Take a look at what's happening with nanotechnology. It's not about making tiny machines out of metal (that look like robots). It's about reformulating configurations of elements, for instance, carbon into bucky balls, nanotubes or ultra thin sheets called graphene that, by their physical characteristics, do amazing, highly focused functions such as sniffing out toxic elements in the air. Nanotechnology will be the foundation of better hearts, better brains, better motor skills, better senses...

So aside from just dealing with good old change, I don't really think there's as much to fear about the guttural reactions I'm seeing when the public is confronted with this amazing and, understandably, disconcerting topic.

After all, what's really happening here is that we're taking knowledge we acquire from a point in time ten to twenty years in our past and apply it to completely new projections twenty to thirty years in the future. Not a problem 100 years ago when the rate of change in a few decades was so small from the perspective of the average guy and gal. Big problem when the data you're just getting comfortable is out-data and just plain wrong. When the rate of change becomes more asymtopic, the knowledge we are just getting to be comfortable with, like cell phones and GPS, prepares us even less for the new stuff around the corner. It's basically that feeling you get at the Boardwalk when you're slowly approaching the apex of that first Roller-coaster peak and...

Check out the arguments at: http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=390vckvrxu

Mrs. Michaels -- Teacher with True Passion

Back in the 60's, Mrs. Michaels was my 7th grade English teacher at Collins Jr. High in Cupertino. Why I love to write is because of her.

Monday through thursday we'd walk into class and find a handful of words on the blackboard. They were usually words few of us knew. After looking them up, we then had 10 minutes to write a one page story, position paper or what-have-you incorporating those blackboard words.

In a month or so, we all got pretty good at the routine. (I've neglected to mention that all of this had to be done in the first 15 minutes of the class.) As much as I started enjoying it, I got mostly B's and couldn't understand why. But then I saw a pattern... the more I took a stand or got philosophical in my one pager, the better the grade. The visible effort of "thinking" was rewarded on a regular basis.

Oh yeah... about fridays. On fridays we'd group up as teams of 5 to do competitive crossword puzzles. Dictionary, thesaurus in hand, we applied what was steadily growing in all of us. True excitement about the English language and how to harness it.

Thank you Mrs. Michaels. I wish you were here to help save the world.

Empathy, Twitter and World Peace -- imagine that...

I've always believed that communication... especially the kind where you can't turn back once you've become dependent on it, would be the end of the Soviet Union. To compete with the rest of the world, I figured they'd have to go somewhere as a nation where their governance would be like a fish out of water... and therefore they'd most likely implode.

The more communication I see the better I like it... you just need to be willing to take the bad with the good. The narcissism is pretty bad right now because we're really ailing as a race that is recognizing that we're on the brink of some potentially scary stuff. So at least we're getting chatty and my prayer (or daily mantra) is that a marvelous side effect will be this world-rounded group hug that people eventually don't want to let go of... the "empathetic embrace" mentioned in the video.

This video by Jeremy Rifkin points out that there's good evidence that empathy is the evolving part of our brain's core competency. There's an incredibly exciting upside to that...

Watch out for increased worker productivity...

As it reports on the continuing Wall Street recovery, CNBC often cites the upbeat economic indicator of "increased worker productivity." It implies goodness, but is it? Is it in fact a short-term and potentially business-killing condition? Here are some of my concerns.

Product design and implementation will suffer because there's less time to simply think. New requirements, new designs and defining effective practices require time to step back, perform continuous research and get the attention of those around you to establish the support (and good critical thinking) you need.

Fewer people wearing more hats means less than 100% responsibility. How can you be in two or three roles at once and really feel like you are covering your territory? And what happens during crunch time, such as a product release, when all your responsibilities become #1? If you were once a person who took pride in your productivity, you find you are becoming an excuse-maker, not out of incompetence, but from feeling just plain overwhelmed.

Critical cross-training becomes an after-thought. Who has time to train people? Who has time to be trained? As essential as it may be, you feel like you're just ensuring that folks won't meet the deadlines they're already facing. Congratulations, that extra hat you've been wearing looks like it's found a permanent home.

Burn out will occur at a faster rate. It doesn't matter how much you love your work. When you're just keeping the ship afloat, there's not much time for the things that previously fueled your passion, such as vision-making or healthy research of new strategies and technologies.

Finally, there is no substitute for intuition or simply sensing that something isn't quite right. A few months later, you're kicking yourself for not having researched that gut feeling when you had it. Then you ask yourself, "why?" and all you can come up with is, "I was too busy being productive."

Still Cloudy, But Steadily Getting More Clear...

I've been using the Cloud as hosted by Amazon EC2. Unexpected value? Yes... as a staging and test deployment platform. The value comes from the ability to take a more deliberate path that puts off hardware purchase plans. Being able to feel like you can really think out the deployment is quite a luxury.

Right now I'm enjoying thinking of using the cloud as a type of DMZ... at least until it's production time. But who knows if I'll want to just keep it in that role through production deployment?

I also like it for the potential of having standardized test platform images. These are pre-configured operating environments that you clone out based on the environment that you've set up and refined. Beats starting over every time you want to create a 2nd, 3rd or 4th testing environment. The only downside to images that I've come up with is this: You often want to assign new developers the task of setting up these environments from relative scratch so that they get an deeper impression of what goes in to setting up the server applications that they've been hired to build, expand and maintain. Without that experience, months and years go by before they really realize how the application they work with is choreographed with respect to support bash scripts, file system layout, including the use of NFS, and other supporting processing, such as a messaging server. There are also the critical configuration property files they read from.

So, what do I think of cloud computing right now? Very cool. It's taught me a lot about firewall configuration, in particular. It's made me feel empowered to try stuff without being dependent on IT. And it simply gives me another arrow in my quiver when contemplating test and, maybe, production deployments. Now... I've got to figure out the contrasting values of going with a hosted cloud versus an in-house VMWare-style cloud... hmmm...