Thoughts about Trends1 Chapter 5: How to Think about Trends R. W. Hamming (from Beyond Calculation)

Thoughts about Trends2 How to Think about Trends The Internal State of the Field:  Main Problems and Tools to Attack;  Workers avoid a Search for Radically New Approaches. Technical Support from Other Fields:  Fast and Small Components of Computers;  Price Estimation;  Restraints by the Supporting Technologies. Surrounding Society Support:  People Selection to study Computer Sciences;  Restricted Social and Political Rules.

Thoughts about Trends3 Rules for Predicting the Future Short-Term Estimates are Optimistic Long-Term Predictions are Pessimistic What can happen  Science What will happen  Engineering & Economics What should happen  Morals, Ethics, accepted or rejected by society.

Thoughts about Trends4 Hardware, Software, and Applications Chips production  General-Purpose Computing; Turing Machine/ Von Neumann Model & Algorithms; Chips with Cache Memory and Pipelines built into them; Parallel Computing; Object Oriented Machines; Functional Programming by Machines:  Simulation of Index Registers (B-boxes);  Floating Point Arithmetic, Vector Processing, C++.

Thoughts about Trends5 Hardware, Software, and Applications (continued) Widely Used Languages & Libraries; Built-in Languages (LISP, FORTRAN, APL, etc.); “From Software To Hardware” Approach; Improvement in Programming: after 50 years by a factor of 10; Speedup of the Computers: after 50 years by a factor of 10 6 ; The Speedup is less for Large Programs; Neural Network Simulation (Artificial Intelligence); Automatic Programming and Teaching; Automatic Translator; Speech Recognition and Generation; Understanding the meaning of the Sentence.

Thoughts about Trends6 Support from Other Fields Most Great Advances in a Field come from OUTSIDE:  Transistor was invented by the Telephone Company to improve their service;  Telephone came from a teacher of the deaf;  Carbon Dating in Archeology came from Physicists, etc. Information Truth or Falsity:  Unorganized and not carefully selected information. Problem of Choice; Commercialization of TV, radio, Internet (?).

Thoughts about Trends7 Society The Matter of Privacy as a Technical and Social Problem; Cryptography; Economics:  Restrictions on the number of people entering the field;  Support for Expensive Projects;  Network Communications (unsatisfactory response);  Intellectual Property Ownership, Patent System;  High Quality Information. Tribal Behavior and Individuality/ Isolation. Growth of Knowledge; “Information Hiding”, Integrated Chips 

Thoughts about Trends8 Human and Society Restrictions Results of Eons of Evolution; Innate Drives; Limited Bandwidth of Input and Output; Modest Rate of Internally Processing Bits of Information; Fixed Patterns of Mental Activity; Highly Specialized Brain Structure, etc. Social Evolution, while more rapid than Biological Evolution, is also rather restricted in its Possibilities;  They, more than Technology, LIMIT our FUTURE.