Posted on 06/04/2018 10:12:53 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Earlier this year I lamented the inevitable death of Moore's Law - crushed between process node failures and exploits attacking execution efficiencies. Yet that top line failure of Moore's Law hides the fact that chips in general are now cheap.
So cheap that the cost of making a device "smart" - whether that means, aware, intelligent, connected, or something else altogether – is now trivial. We're therefore quickly transitioning from the Death of Moore's Law into the era of Moore's Revenge - where pretty much every manufactured object has a chip in it.
This is going to change the whole world, and it's going to begin with a fundamental reorientation of IT, away from the "pinnacle" desktops and servers, toward the "smart dust" everywhere in the world: collecting data, providing services - and offering up a near infinity of attack surfaces. Dumb is often harder to hack than smart, but - as we saw last month in the Z-Wave attack that impacted hundreds of millions of devices - once you've got a way in, enormous damage can result.
The focus on security will produce new costs for businesses - and it will be on IT to ensure those costs don't exceed the benefits of this massively chipped-and-connected world. It'll be a close-run thing.
It's also likely to be a world where nothing works precisely as planned. With so much autonomy embedded in our environment, the likelihood of unintended consequences amplifying into something unexpected becomes nearly guaranteed.
We may think the world is weird today, but once hundreds of billions of marginally intelligent and minimally autonomous systems start to have a go, that weirdness will begin to arc upwards exponentially. As @swiftonsecurity recently highlighted, utterly unexpected interactions now have potentially serious security consequences.
Once got called into a support issue, exec's Outlook always crashing. Turned out to be an Office Add-in from the BLUETOOTH DRIVER. — SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 26, 2016
When that kind of weird becomes common - your car doesn't start because your dishwasher is throwing a tantrum – it may dampen our enthusiasm for the connected world.
We'll need new skills as IT becomes something more like "deep ecology", springing from an intersection of systems thinking and profound awareness of the computing environment and the sorts of smart things interacting within it. That is bound to confuse straight-line thinkers used to problem/solution matrices rather than the more nuanced gardening we'll need to keep a profoundly out-of-control situation from going completely feral.
And when it does go feral - as it will, regularly - we'll need specialists to swoop in, diagnose and treat our complexly unwell ecosystems. Those are the 10x types in our immediate future - not the rockstar programmers but the patient, insightful folks who use experience and intuition to bring clarity to the most obscure of problems.
With the recent VISA TOESUP* (plus Telstra plus NAB) we've seen the shape of a connected world that charts its own path, irrespective of our designs: Man proposes, tech disposes. ®
This article actually touches one of the facets supporting my belief that the lords return is near. Not decades, but weeks or a few years away.
One facet.
There was a Twilight Zone episode based on a short story, where the public became so dumbed-down, that intelligence had to be built into all tools.
A few years later, I saw a cash register in McDonalds that had pictures instead of numbers on the keys and I thought "We're on our way".
So True. 30 years after buying my first MS/Windows computer, all the vaunted ease of connectivity, transferring data, storage, etc... marketing just means the failures and problems simply occur in slightly different ways, on new devices, or the cloud. Same shit, different sandwich.
Which facet is that? PM me if you are uncomfortable making it public.
Idiocracy was a documentary. Also you’ll probably enjoy the hell out of it.
p
Collapse of western civilization due to the catastrophic challenges to our very daily lives due to technology. The “smart dust” comment kinda gets to it.
We are, in my opinion, on the brink of discovering the keys to immortality. We are on the brink of the utter collapse of the western world’s economy. We are on the bring of invasive technology that wipes out our current cultures almost overnight - a rate of change happening that is already tearing at people’s ability to cope with change. We’re at the brink of utter “worldwide” civil war due to the ability of both sides to polarize and antagonize each other in ways that are almost certain to take us from cold war to hot war in the streets. It’s just waiting for the right black swan to bring it to critical mass.
Civilization is seeing breakneck change in so many arenas, I honestly don’t see how humanity can survive without trying to destroy itself in the process.
We’re therefore quickly transitioning from the Death of Moore’s Law into the era of Moore’s Revenge — where pretty much every manufactured object has a chip in it. …And some of those androids/gynoids being made in Nihon may end up having chips on their shoulders.
Stupid people with smart phones.
“the inevitable death of Moore’s Law “
It wasn’t a law then; was it? More like a trend. But “Moore’s Trend” would have been insufficiently grandiose.
Sounds like you and I are on the same page, then.
In the future, all of the appliances are going to go back to being dumb.
‘Cuz smart appliances are nothing but a security risk for your home network - or are at risk from your home network.
Smart homes are a dumb idea.
There was a time when chess playing software was considered an example of artificial intelligence. However, as programs became more proficient, the understanding of how the programs worked also became clearer. When you understand how it works, it no longer seems to be an example of "intelligence".
My present definition is that "artificial intelligence" is exhibited by any system which performs a useful service and whose detailed operation IS NOT UNDERSTOOD.
This article describes a world in which we are surrounded by systems that are performing useful functions but whose detailed operation is not understood and which defy efforts to eliminate idiosyncratic non-intentional behaviors. Much artificial intelligence in the future will deserve to be referred to as "artificial stupidity".
“It’s got electrolytes!” :-)
I agree. I refuse to put those things in my house, or purchase a house with those features.
I do OS/IT support for a living. I don't want to come home to do the same things.
For some reason, this brought to mind something used in that Netflix show “Altered Carbon”. Altered Carbon takes place hundreds of years in the future where everything is connected.
One of the characters was using a completely unhackable video system for recording illegal fights.
They panned down to the system and he ejected a VCR tape. heh.
Sometimes older is better.
>> more nuanced gardening we’ll need to keep a profoundly out-of-control situation from going completely feral.<<
“Feral Computing.”
DAMN! I wish I had thought of that!!!!
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