Computers and their role in our lives

I sometimes wonder where the world of computers is headed.
In high school for math and physics, we had to learn to master the slide rule. We had to be able to multiply, divide find square roots, and many other functions on either that straight stick or the circular stick.
Adding machines could add and were big and bulky.
At Waterloo University, we still depended on the slide rule and the chemistry society in 1970 purchased two calculators for students to use. Students taking computer courses were using the big IBM 360 computer in “Fryers Fort”.
Times they were a changing. You had to know and understand programming to make those calculations and had to punch up boxes of data on computer cards that could be read. It was time consuming and a single line of code could expunge everything and then the search was on to find the error.
Fast forward 40 years and today computers play a role in almost everything we do. Our smart phones can let us know to within a half-meter where we are at any given moment. With thousands of applications we can do almost everything from videoing children at play, to taking photographs reading books and newspapers, watching television and much more. Forty years ago we never dreamed about the power of the computer.
If we had written about the power of the smart phone then, it would have been science fiction.
Today our microwaves and ovens can tell when things are cooked. Our smart TV’s can let us surf the web and download movies and commercial free television programs. Our PVR’s allow us to record and skip over commercials, so that a football game or baseball game can be watched in 90 minutes instead of over two hours. Our time has been saved.
Very few people feel comfortable parallel parking. Every auto manufacturer now has a computer available as an option for drivers to use to parallel park. It joins the other 30-100 computers in autos that are sold.
In the workplace, computers and automation have made us all more productive. The downside is that it has also reduced the work force. In a column in the New York Times titled “If I had a Hammer” Thomas L. Friedman noted that we are at the start of the Second Machine Age. If you recall the first Machine Age began with the invention of the steam engine in the late 1700’s. As industry developed steam delivered more and more power and was adapted to hauling freight across countries and oceans.
Today software engineers are developing tools for the computers that take on more and more jobs once held by people. We all watched as “Watson” destroyed all the humans who were super champions on Jeopardy. IBM has now made the computer available for commercial applications in New York.
“Watson” consumed data and could output it faster than any human. It is able gather and to cross-reference information across vast subject matter and come to conclusions. It can outpace any individual in gathering and digesting information. One of its principle uses will be in banking cancer research.
These artificial intelligence machines can often make better decisions than humans.
The movie “Her” in which “Theodore Twombly” falls in love with the voice on his smart phone is really not too far off the mark in the potential of computing. Digital or on-line dating is more and more popular and over 40% of couples admit to connecting through the Internet.
With all the smart phones, tablets, computers sending out information, computers like “Watson” will be the vacuums of information. We will have to learn how to ask the right questions of those computers to use the information. We will have to train and teach ourselves those skills. That information will create new jobs and industries.
Computers seem to be even more involved in our lives than ever. We have to learn how to use that computer power.
–Jim Cumming,
Publisher