You love your computer, don’t you. Go on, It’s okay, you can admit it here. No one will judge you.
You love the way you can keep in contact with your closest friends, spy on your dearest enemies, stalk people you have never met, watch TV shows you have missed (or haven’t yet missed), listen to music, write blogs…
But your affection has a darker side to it. Like a nagging feeling that is something wrong with the foundations of your relationship. You don’t experience the same excitement that there was when you first met each other.
The problem with the romance betwixt you and your beloved? The sad truth is that you have had to change for it.
When you first sat down at a computer (I mean really the first time, for me this would be when I was around four years old) you were presented by a series of shapes, or icons. Behind these shapes were untold wonders: words, pictures, even games; but first you must get to these shapes. Your natural reaction is to reach for the screen, the tactile sensation of glass on skin. The computer ignores you. Again: skin, glass, nothing. The portal to this strange world is a small piece of plastic called a “mouse”.
It gets even worse when it comes to talking to this strange electron-blooded creature. Instead of casually writing on a piece of paper, or talking, you must learn a whole new set of hand-eye-coordination skills in order to depress what you wish to say on an illogically laid out set of buttons.
“Okay, okay, we’ve heard this all before,” I hear you say, “But we have the Apple iPhone, the
Microsoft Surface and the
Perceptive Pixel screen now. These require no mouse or keyboard. Your point is moot dear fellow!”
Well, you may be right, however these are just novelties. A fun toy to show off to your friends with, or gimcrack displays to woo potential customers visiting your company lobby. Do you see Dell, HP, Mac or any other companies releasing personal computers with these? No, of course you don’t. Why? Change requires time and coordination. Technology must become popular enough for the cost to come down, companies to release operating systems for them and people to write programs for them.
An impossible task? Of course not, but with both consumer and company so set in their ways of using point and click interfaces, it’s going to be many a year before you scroll down this page by moving your finger down these words.
Finished. Problem sorted. Yes we can and all that jazz.
No.
The problem with computers isn’t just down to how we interact with them; the problem is the very essence of the computer itself. Past the clumsy RSI-inducing keyboard, past the infuriating operating system into the very soul of the machine. As the title of this rant says, there are two problems with computers: they go by the names of one and zero.
Binary, the beating heart of the modern day computer is the thing that is holding it back.
Tick. A series of bits switch from zero to one and visa versa. Tock. Numbers are stored. Tick. Sums are calculated. Tock. The answer is moved a little further along the chain. Tick. Tock. Tick.
Like a Nazi party parade, your computer marches high and low, true and false, one and zero, five volts and naught volts through the streets of the city of your motherboard. Trudge, trudge, trudge.
Computers are slow.
“Oh no,” you say, “they’re not slow and even if they are now, Moore’s law says every two years processing power double in speed.” (Dear nerds, I know it doesn’t quite say that, but effectively the result is the same.)
Unfortunately Moore’s law will come to it’s end. Binary computing can only get so small (down to a few molecules) and therefore fast.
My point, which I really feel I should get to, is that the power consumption of processors also follow Moore’s law and because of this binary computing is horrifically inefficient from an eco point of view. The human brain works considerably faster than any computer, and can store so much more information than the best hard drive. To put this into perspective: the whole of the Internet could be stored in
three brains. All of this while consuming considerably less than even an energy efficient laptop, and taking up much less room than a server.
Our own internal computer does not use binary, it uses analogue: one, zero and everywhere in-between. Our electronics brethren struggle to read a book or listen to you shout profanities at it. The software that is used to do this can simulate what humans do, but this massively analogue task cannot be performed easily or efficiently by the strict regime of the digital world.
In order to achieve a suitable form of computing, we must abandon binary, and perhaps even electronics. Perhaps one day you may have to feed a snack to your new cuddly computer as it purrs gently on your desk, who knows? I like to think that a computer may just end up as an elegant looking block of glass, your old laptop now used to stop that wobbly desk.
I look forward to a world without ones and zeros. I look forward to a world without buttons (the extreme of this being removing the interface completely and imbedding straight into the brain). I look forward to this, but I do not hold out hope, we are too set in our ways.
Congratulations if you have read this far. You have lead a lot. Feel sorry for any computer trying to do the same.
