The future of computing, of humanity
I predict that in the future there will be few powerful personal computers. While the personal computer slows its growth in terms of performance, the internet will become increasingly ubiquitous. We will eventually transfer almost all of our computing needs to giant serving and computing farms. Perhaps we will even logon to a server via the internet to access our software instead of loading it into our personal computers.
Maybe in the end it is more efficient to centralize. And with the right security measures it could be reasonably safe. But maybe it’s a human tendency to put power in the hands of the few.
Think of the potential problems consolidating our data and computer centers could bring.
- Loss of privacy. When all our data is stored and maintained by someone else, there is no guarantee of privacy, even with the encryption and laws which we are currently developing.
- Vulnerability. What’s worse than losing that document you just wrote and forgot to save? Losing every document you’ve ever worked on. Between terrorist attacks, hardware failure and human error, concentrating our data and computing facilities provides a larger target for failure.
- Loss of power. When we give our data and computational power to some central computing facility we give up our power in exchange for ease and the idea of security. Sound familiar?
It’s interesting to see that even as I write this we are placing more and more power in the hands of the few. The government has been on a decades long journey to consolidate power. Large corporations are trying to convince us to do the same. Even our sources of food and energy all come from centralized locations (giant agri-business, the middle east).
Just as our computing architectures are moving towards consolidation, so are our governmental, and civil structures.
Most of us have only one source of income given to us by a company that will cut us when it suits the bottom line. This in exchange for an allegedly “assured” bi-weekly pay check.
Not that a totally distributed model is the most efficient and mutually beneficial model… but I wonder…
Why is it that we humans want to give all our power to someone else in exchange for the idea of protection and ease, especially when evidence shows that centralizing schemes are highly prone to abuse?
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March 25th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
We do the same thing in the church as well. We give the “priestly duties” to one person or a few elders in order to protect ourselves from God’s holiness and give ourselves ease and comfort. We are all priests now since we have the Holy Spirit inside each one of us. We should all be performing the duties of worship and service and discipleship and communication with God. The Catholic church took this to an extreme by placing all the power in the hands of one person, the Pope, and look at all the trouble that has gotten them into.