on 25 April 2008Ever worry about how much power your Mac uses? Professor Andy Hopper does. 25 years ago he was one of the boffins behind the legendary BBC Micro, a byzantine experiment in processor architecture that accidentally got released as a mass market home computer. So naturally he’s now qualified to hold forth on the future of everything with a plug.
Hopper’s latest idea is that it’s much too wasteful having a PC sitting on each person’s desk drawing electricity from the domestic mains, which has to be got there through the inefficient National Grid. Silly, silly, silly. Instead, there should be a small number of huge server farms in locations where wind and solar power are available onsite. Apparently that IBM bloke who (apocryphally) said there’d never be any need for more than five computers was more prescient than we thought. Centralised processing is the way forward, and mere individuals will only be permitted a dumb terminal, presumably powered from a treadmill worked by former desktop computer company executives.
‘There’s something very special about computing power,’ muses Hopper, ‘which is very different from heating your house’. Yes, the fact that it uses a zillionth of the energy, so remind us why we’re having this conversation?
Call me reactionary, but I think Prof Hopper may be barking up the wrong tree. And I was being kind there when I added ‘up the wrong tree’. It’s bad enough trying to type this column in Word 2008 on a G5 iMac, which by my reckoning is slightly slower than using a John Bull printing set. Imagine trying to edit HD video footage on a processor 5000 miles away. And if ISPs are worried about the bandwidth we might use watching telly on the BBC iPlayer, try telling them they’re going to have to carry every megaflop of our computing activity between us and EuroServerLand™, 24/7.
That’s before you start on personal freedom, the operation of a consumer-led free market in hardware, or the wisdom of putting eggs in fewer baskets. All things considered, taking back all the computing autonomy that’s spread into every home and office in the developed world over the last half-century and recompressing it into a few giant processing factories would make about as much sense as piling up all the UK’s air freshener in Swindon and building a network of pipes to waft it around the country.
Bear in mind that the British Government is currently supporting the efforts of the BPI, the music industry’s enforcer, to oblige ISPs to threaten and ultimately disconnect any user suspected of sharing music tracks. Cutting off households from the Internet because someone allegedly swapped copyright material may seem a tad disproportionate, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. Under the Hopper model, presumably, if someone didn’t like what you were doing, not only would your broadband stop working, but your applications and data would disappear faster than a record company’s ethics in a royalty calculation.
That would suit people like multi-millionaire Paul McGuinness. He thinks a free Internet is ‘a thieves’ charter’, and wants everyone who operates any part of its infrastructure to be accountable both to the state and to big business for everything users do online, as well as paying a tithe to the record companies to compensate for all the imaginary money they might have made if only the march of technology could have been stopped at the invention of the CD. It’s a vision that a human rights advocate such as Bono, whose band he manages, should be proud of.
Moving computing away from the desktop can have no result other than disempowering users, unless you buy into the Web 3.0 fallacy that the more we connect stuff, the less work we’ll have to do to process it. Google’s Eric Schmidt reckons the next wave of web applications will be ‘distributed virally: literally by social networks, by email. You won’t go to the store and purchase them.’ As Yahoo’s Jerry Yang helpfully explains, these days ‘you don’t have to be a computer scientist to create a program.’
Well, you don’t need many qualifications to poke a stick in your eye, either, but that doesn’t mean we’re all going to do it. I’d rather go to the store and purchase my software, to be honest. So much simpler than sifting through an inbox full of viral spam, trying to figure out whether ‘roger329 says try WhackMyWidget 0.7.901b-RC55!’ means (a) my friend Roger, who is clueless about all inanimate objects, is helpfully giving me the benefit of his software recommendations, or (b) I’m about to click a link to a fake Viagra shop run by the Estonian mafia.
Big visions are all very well, but sometimes they come from overlooking the answers in front of your nose. Privately owned hardware running professionally designed applications that can’t be halted on someone else’s whim, connected passively by a content-agnostic network that belongs to everybody and nobody – that seems about as good a system as we’re going to get, even if it does mean turning the central heating down a bit.
Adam Banks is posting his vote in the local elections before they decide it would be more efficient just to look up the result on Wikipedia.
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