A better nation?

“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.”—Alasdair Gray

Inspiring idea … but what does a better nation look like? How does it work?

Read this.

In my post TechnoLiberation a few weeks ago, I rather vaguely proposed that the new political/economic paradigm would come up from underneath, that it would be predicated on enormous numbers of people using information technology to create new forms of interaction that worked for humans, that superseded the current models, rather than did battle with them.

Paul Mason’s new book, for which the article is a pre-publication taster menu, makes a much stronger, more detailed, and compelling case that the beginnings of this transformation are under way already – that the economics of information underpin all sorts of human initiatives, on a wide number of fronts, that offer tentative blueprints for ‘a better nation’ in the making.

A better nation – and one which people in technology can easily imagine that they are working in the early days of.

50 years of Moore’s Law

Although we all know about Moore’s Law, and about the all-but-absurd increase in computing power at ever lower prices that its effects have given rise to, it is still worth reading this short article/graphic at IEEE.org.

Sample boggling sentence:

More transistors were made in 2014 than in all the years prior to 2011.

Convergence is coming like a train on rails…

Blogger Brian Posey, discussing Microsoft’s ‘Continuum’ concept, has this;

In another demo, someone connected their Windows Phone to a large screen and to a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Not only did Office expand to accommodate the larger screen size, but the experience was identical to that of working on a PC. The presenter even said that with some of the higher-end phone models it will be possible to use your phone as a phone and a “PC” at the same time. It would be possible, for example, to work on a spreadsheet on the big screen while talking on the phone, playing a game or watching a video on the phone’s built-in display.

Using the phone as a PC seemed like a completely seamless experience. The only indication that the presenter was not using a PC was the fact that there was no desktop mode.

This is convergence, and I predict (with my usual complete lack of originality) that it will produce a major upheaval, and the final nail in the coffin of the traditional PC as a consumer device. I’ve been going on about it for ages, but not here so far.

The logic is simple. If you have, always with you, a powerful-enough computer that has access to all the software and data you need, then why would you ever bother to use a different device? Why would you spend out on another powerful computer, with different software, that is effectively immobile – another device that condemns you to continually switching interfaces, worrying about synchronisation, using different networks, different UI paradigms. Seriously, why?

Well, for quite a number of very good reasons, you are no doubt thinking – but the thing is, all of those reasons are melting away, and melting fast…

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