The Accelerating Pace of Change

Attentive readers will recall that my April 1st post – Books was originally intended as part of a collection of vignettes on turn-of-the-century technology companies. The only other part of that long-abandoned project that managed to get itself written is the following parody on the culture of innovation and its consequences. It is more authentic than you might imagine. 

As everyone knows, in the World of Computers things are getting faster and faster all the time. This is known as Moore's Law and is Fundamental. To keep up with all these changes it is essential to stay constantly on the move as far as skills and competences are concerned. As soon as you get the merest whiff of some new terminology or language that you haven't heard of before, you have no other alternative but to check it out immediately - either by snuffling around magazine articles, grazing on-line tutorials or buying a fat book on the subject.

There is one crucial point to remember however and it is this: on no account must you be tempted to allow curiosity to grow into a Technical Skill – for the simple reason that you might be foolish enough to put it to practical use. Quite apart from the fact that you will undoubtedly discover the subject to be far more complicated than you first thought, the real mistake arises from the fact that you simply haven't got the time. To use your new-found skill today is to renounce the possibility of acquiring a much better one tomorrow.

Go on, admit it – you are sceptical about this. "Yes, very witty." you snort. Alright, let's look at a practical illustration.

On Monday, Bob and Alice both read an article about a new computer language called Goo. They nose around it's features, add a few keywords and acronyms to their technical vocabulary and learn just enough to contribute to a respectable discussion with the average marketing executive (which – let’s admit it – is not that much).

But, now Bob is lured down the Path of Error. He decides that Goo is just the thing he's been looking for to build his latest app and he embarks on, what we computer types call An Implementation. 

Ah, foolishness and folly. By Wednesday he's fully immersed in the inner workings of Goo and discovering that it's not all easy going; but all the same, he confidently expects to have the job done by Friday.

Alice meanwhile, has her sights firmly fixed on bigger things. On Tuesday morning, whilst browsing an obscure technical website, she discovers Goo++ a far superior version of yesterday's language and spends the rest of the day familiarising herself with its features. On Wednesday she applies her new-found knowledge to the same project that Bob is working on and, because of The Accelerating Pace of Change, is all done by Thursday and takes Friday off, but not before thoughtfully emailing Bob to tell him he's wasting his time.

Except, of course, she does no such thing.

Ah, you sharp-witted reader; I see you've spotted the flaw. No, Alice – our wise protagonist – spends Wednesday dining in a fashionable eatery with Ted, the Chief Technical Officer where, over a dish of fresh mussels, she extols the virtues of Goo++. Ted listens admiringly while she recommends that they suspend all ongoing Goo development, retrain the personnel involved and assign them to a new Goo++ project group, in which, under her direction, they will toil on the treadmill of implementation until they are completely burnt out.

The moral of the story being: Never let today’s reality blind you to tomorrow’s potential.

Attentive readers will have observed a curious implication of this principle.

For Moore's Law, which  can be more precisely stated as:

"What you don't do this week you'll do in half the time if you put it off for a week and a half"

implies that sometime around next October a state will be reached where the Leading Edge will be moving infinitely fast and computer expertise will consequently cease to progress any further. The corollary, of course, (I see you bursting with eagerness to beat me to it) being that all computing tasks will potentially be complete by the same date had they been undertaken - which of course they weren't. So the Perfection of Computing Expertise occurs at precisely the same time as all further development ceases.

Of course, the reality is a little more mundane. We are saved from this fate by the simple fact that the Wheels of Change are mired in the inescapable Mud of Practicality. People insist on do things with their knowledge and consequently slow things down just enough to ensure life carries on,

And a good thing too, I say.