We're in the early stages of the second great transformation in business computing - a shift from the reigning client/server model (in which individual companies own and maintain their own IT "power plants") to the utility model (in which outside utilities will run the plants). The change is going to take a while, not just because utility computing's underlying technologies, like virtualization, are far from mature but also because managers naturally fear losing control over the IT assets that have become so essential to their operations. Few executives enjoy having to run their own IT plants (Lord knows, it's not their core business), but most of them have at least a little bit of the "box hugger" in them.

What will spur companies to make the leap will in many cases be a crisis. We've already seen an example with the imposition of regulatory regimes such as Sarbanes-Oxley or, in health care, HIPAA that require firms to meet tough standards for data security, disaster recovery, and so forth. Faced with having to invest heavily in modernizing their IT infrastructures, policies, and staffs to meet the new requirements, some businesses have opted to unload much of their infrastructure onto utility providers running secure, state-of-the-art data centers. They find it makes economic sense to offload the capital investments and labor costs to an outsider, and, equally important, they like the fact that it gives them a way to get the risk and liability off their own shoulders. (It's kind of like keeping a get-out-of-jail-free card in your back pocket.)

Now, companies suddenly have another good reason to jump to the utility model: electricity costs. Corporate data centers are power hogs, and their gluttony gets worse every year. Earlier this week, TechTarget reported on a new survey by AFCOM, one of the leading IT professional societies, that showed the amount of electricity used by the average data center is increasing at an 8% annual clip, and for some centers the growth rate is as high as 20%. Up until now, though, the increases haven't been severe enough to attract the attention of most business executives. But that's about to change. The spike in oil and natural gas prices is pushing the cost of electricity up dramatically as well. Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, for instance, has just been told by its electric companies that rates are going up 27%. Combine that kind of rate jump with the ongoing increase in consumption, and you've got a problem that's going to get noticed. As the hospital's data center manager, Bob Doherty, notes, "If I told my boss that my staff wanted a 27% increase [in pay], I'd be downstairs on the carpet."

If energy prices stay high, expect to see another wave of companies embrace the utility model and start to close down their data centers. It looks like box-hugging is about to get considerably more expensive.

7:32:58 PM    comment   

Bloggers haven't been shy about pointing out the flaws of traditional print and broadcast journalism - what they often call the "mainstream media." Up until now, the criticism has been mostly a one-way street. The articles about blogging in traditional media outlets have been, on balance, pretty positive. That's changing now. As the blogosphere's influence grows, its own flaws are finally getting the inspection they deserve. In its new issue, for instance, Forbes has a big story that examines how the blogosphere has become "the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns." It's a charge that's hard to dispute, and Lyons does a good job of documenting the problem. The article's aggressive, to be sure, but that's Forbes's style.

It would be nice to think the blogosphere would use the piece as an occasion for a little bit of soul searching. But instead of addressing the criticism, most bloggers are simply blasting the messenger. Dan Gillmor sums up the article as "a pile of trash ... an alarmist and at times absurd broadside." Paul Kedrosky says the article is "dopey" and asks "how did it ever see print in tech-friendly Forbes." Steve Rubell, who charmingly refers to the real world as the "meatspace," goes into church-lady mode: "Forbes, I am very disappointed that you chose to take such an unbalanced POV when BusinessWeek and Fortune told us both sides of the story."

A common theme in the responses is that Lyons is "damn[ing] all bloggers for the sins of the few," as Doc Searls (in an otherwise balanced response) puts it. That's a misrepresentation. Lyons specifically writes that "attack blogs are but a sliver of the rapidly expanding blogosphere." (He does go on to argue that the problem extends beyond the bad actors themselves - scurrilous or one-sided attacks are naturally amplified in the blogosphere's vast echo chamber - but that's a valid point.) The fact is, in the context of the article's argument, it's clear that references to "blogs" and "blogging" are references to the attack blogs that are the subject of the piece, not to all blogs or bloggers.

Lyons's article isn't beyond criticism. His rhetoric does get overheated at times, and he can stretch too far in trying to make his points as pointed as possible. But those are hardly hanging offenses in magazine writing, and in the "citizen journalism" of the blogosphere they're as commonplace as typos. In rushing to dismiss the article, the blogosphere is simply exposing another of its shortcomings: It can dish it out, but it can't take it.

7:18:05 PM    comment   

Last March, on the website Edge, the playwright Richard Foreman wrote what might be taken as a draft of an elegy for humankind:

I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated and articulate personality - a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West ...

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance - as we all become "pancake people" - spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or "super-consciousness"? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so - and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.

George Dyson, the historian and author, wrote a fascinating response to Foreman, in which he suggested (at least this is what I think he suggested) that we are at a turning point in the history of the computer and, in turn, the world. Up to now, computers have been limited by the fact that "every bit of information has to be stored (and found) in precisely the right place." This rigid system is completely different from the biological model of information processing, "which is based on template-based addressing, and is consequently far more robust. The instructions say 'do X with the next copy of Y that comes around' without specifying which copy, or where." But today we're seeing the biological model begin to be replicated in an electronic information system. Who's creating this new computer? Google. Built on the self-evolving biological model, Google's search engine, according to Dyson, represents the first step toward "true" artificial intelligence - the 'super-consciousness' that already has begun pounding us "into [Foreman's] instantly-available pancakes," turning us into "the unpredictable but statistically critical synapses" of the Google Brain.

Dyson has now expanded and extended his essay. The inspiration was a trip he recently made to Google's headquarters, where an engineer told him, "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI." After reporting this comment, Dyson quotes Alan Turing on the development of AI systems: "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children. Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."

Dyson ends on an ominous, if enigmatic, note:

Google is Turing's cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope. In the words of an unusually perceptive friend: "When I was there, just before the IPO, I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?"

For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings:

"When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain."

7:17:30 PM    comment   

As I said, they can dish it out, but they can't take it. (Seriously, though, Kedrosky's blog is great; check out the presentation he links to here. And this.) Still, I think Searls's even-keeled take is more constructive. By the way, that wasn't my knee I was jerking.

7:15:27 PM    comment   

As anybody who's read my work knows, I'm fascinated by the utopianism that springs up whenever a major new technology comes along. I recently picked up a collection of essays on this theme, called Imagining Tomorrow, which was published in 1986 by the MIT Press. One of the essays, by Susan J. Douglas, looks at the excitement set off by Marconi's introduction of his "wireless telegraph" to the American public in 1899. "Wireless held a special place in the American imagination precisely because it married idealism and adventure with science," Douglas writes.

The invention stirred dreams of a more perfect world, expressed in language that won't sound unfamiliar to today's readers:

Popular Science Monthly observed: "The nerves of the whole world are, so to speak, being bound together, so that a touch in one country is transmitted instantly to a far-distant one." Implicit in this organic metaphor was the belief that a world so physically connected would become a spiritual whole with common interests and goals. The New York Times added: "Nothing so fosters and promotes a mutual understanding and a community of sentiment and interests as cheap, speedy and convenient communication." Articles suggested that this technology could make men more rational; with better communications available, misunderstandings could be avoided. These visions suggested that machines, by themselves, could change history; the right invention could help people overcome human foibles and weaknesses.

The Atlantic Monthly even published a sonnet titled "Wireless Telegraphy" that ended with these lines:

Somewhere beyond the league-long silences,
Somewhere across the spaces of the years,
A heart will thrill to thee, a voice will bless,
Love will awake and life be perfected!

The rise of wireless also set off a popular movement to democratize media, as hundreds of thousands of "amateur operators" took to the airwaves. It was the original blogosphere. "On every night after dinner," wrote Francis Collins in the 1912 book Wireless Man, "the entire country becomes a vast whispering gallery." The amateurs, Douglas reports, "claimed to be surrogates for 'the people.'"

But it didn't last. By the 1920s, radio had become "firmly embedded in a corporate grid." People happily went back to being passive consumers: "In the 1920s there was little mention of world peace or of anyone's ability to track down a long-lost friend or relative halfway around the world. In fact, there were not many thousands of message senders, only a few ... Thus, through radio, Americans would not transcend the present or circumvent corporate networks. In fact they would be more closely tied to both."

7:14:15 PM    comment   

The insanely expensive Vertu phone is coming out in an even more insanely expensive Limited Edition Ascent White model in time for, yes, that's right, the holidays. For just $5200, you too can have this fabulously luxurious cellphone that not only looks good, but comes with a 24/7 concierge service that will get you just about anything you request at any time. The hardware itself is special because it's made of custom-developed Liquidmetal alloy that claims to be stronger than titanium. Add that to it's jeweled ruby bearings supporting every key, sapphire crystal screen and completely stain-resistant holster and you should be impressed. Inside, it's got Bluetooth, PC sync, modem support, email and MMS and is a tri-band GSM phone. Unfortunately, this ain't no lightweight model. At 173 grams it may just weigh down your pocket a little too much for every day use. Also, there's no camera, which may or may not be a good thing according to your job (attorneys and government workers can rejoice).

Vertu Ascent White Special Edition [Cnet]

7:12:31 PM    comment