Whatsnext

Science fiction writers have always speculated about the future -- sometimes they are quite accurate (Jules Verne predicted live newscasts, space travel, and the Internet in the 19th century) and other times not so much (flying cars haven't taken off yet). Authors typically set their science fiction stories well into the future, so they can get in a few good years of sales before the future becomes the present and their works begin to look naïve and obsolete. Far-future settings also allow an author to solicit a greater suspension of disbelief from the reader -- sure, warp drives and holodecks sound fanciful, but who's to say what wonders may be common in 400 years? However, occasionally authors will accept the difficult challenge of setting their stories in a near-future world similar to our own, where predictions about technological advancement must be grounded in reality and "science as magic" hand waving is not tolerated. It is these stories, when written by authors with expertise in the subject matter and the willingness to conduct research, that provide invaluable inspiration to those of us in the business of turning imagination into reality.

Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End and Charles Stross's Halting State are two recent books that do an excellent job of illuminating possible future paths of software technology. Both books are written by authors who are experienced in the art of software (Vinge is a computer scientist, and Stross is a recovering programmer), and both books express a very specific vision of the next steps in software based on current technology and well understood trends. These books describe a future where ubiquitous computing has become a reality. Computers have mostly disappeared into the woodwork, keyboards and mice have given way to gestures, and users live in an information-rich augmented reality world where electronic eyewear overlays data onto everyday scenes in useful, and sometimes not so useful, ways.

Rainbows End is set in the year 2025, and is told from the perspective of a recently cured Alzheimer's survivor who must come to terms with the changes in the world around him, while unknowingly becoming involved in an international conspiracy. The common operating systems and user interfaces of today, such as Microsoft Windows, are no longer commercially viable (except as legacy interfaces for old people) and have been replaced with a product called Epiphany which ties the new technologies together. Computer hardware is sown into the fabric of clothes, and the display device of choice is a pair of electronically enhanced contact lenses. As far as the story goes, I don't think this is Vinge's best work, and I found the bits about the life-extended elderly being "retrained" for new jobs alongside high school students to be somewhat hokey. However, for idea-obsessed readers, the incredible detail given to technological speculation makes up for the weak story, and I can't resist a book whose most clever chapter has one of the best titles ever: "How-to-Survive-the-Next-Thirty-Minutes.pdf". If you want a taste of Vinge's writing with a better story line, I'd recommend the excellent Marooned in Realtime.

The story of Halting State takes place in the year 2018, and revolves around a software engineer at a company that produces massively multiplayer online games. This character finds himself unwillingly tangled in a complex web of international intrigue that is made possible by the ubiquitous computer technology portrayed in the book. While Halting State describes a similar ubiquitous computing environment as Rainbows End, the hardware speculation is less ambitious -- instead of wearable computers, mobile phones are the principle unit of personal computing, and eyeglasses provide the augmented reality overlay instead of contact lenses. Halting State is unconventionally written in the second person, as a homage to early computer adventure games. While I know at least one person who found this to be distracting, the second person prose became natural and unnoticeable for myself and others after the first chapter or two.

I found a couple of the technological predictions presented in these books to be particularly clever. In the world of Rainbows End, transparent cryptography has encouraged the development of sophisticated economic systems. The authenticity provided by digital signatures and certificates not only protects the movement of money, but allows contracts for specific goods and services to be anonymously subcontracted in real time without the involvement of lawyers. The anonymity allows arbitrary individuals to interact with the economy in various agreed-upon roles -- a concept that software engineers refer to as the "separation of interface and implementation." The efficiency makes possible rich systems of multi-level affiliations, with each level providing value in well-defined ways. These new systems raise issues of their potential for criminal abuse, which are explored in the book. In the following excerpt from Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, Juan Orozco is subcontracting a task -- which he himself was subcontracted anonymously from a third party -- to Winston Blount, who verifies the authenticity of the payment promise by checking its digital signature which is certified by a trusted third party -- in this case, Bank of America:

"Y-you know, Dean, I may be able to help. No wait -- I don't mean by myself. I have an affiliance you might be interested in."

"Oh?"

He seemed to know what affiliance was. Juan explained Big Lizard's deal. "So there could be some real money in this." He showed him the payoff certificates, and wondered how much his recruit would see there.

Blount squinted his eyes, no doubt trying to parse the certificates into a form that Bank of America could validate. After a moment he nodded, without granting Juan numerical enlightenment. "But money isn't everything, especially in my situation."

"Well, um, I bet whoever's behind these certs would have a lot of angles. Maybe you could get a conversion to help-in-kind. I mean, to something you need."

In Halting State, the intersection of refined peer-to-peer networking protocols, massively parallel execution contexts, and the increasing computational power of hand-held devices has led to the development of the Zone, an advanced distributed computing environment which relies on processing power provided by the mobile phones of its users. The phone-based Zone nodes are implemented as virtual machine sandboxes which execute distributed code written in the "Python 3000" language. In the following excerpt from Charles Stross's Halting State, the protagonist explains how the Zone uses cryptography to protect assets in online games:

“Zone games don't run on a central server, they run on distributed-processing nodes using a shared network file system. To stop people meddling with the contents, everything is locked using a cryptographic authorization system. If you ‘own' an item in the game, what it really means is that nobody else can update its location or ownership attributes without you using your digital signature to approve the transaction -- and a co-signature signed by 
a cluster of servers all spying on each other to make sure they haven't been suborned.”

Both Vinge's and Stross's visions of software's future rely on cryptographic systems which are more ubiquitous and transparent than most of the systems in use today. While secure web transactions have been quite successful and have largely met the goal of transparently verifying the authenticity of the web server, use of certificates by individuals to prove their authenticity to others (whether via the web, email, IM, or other protocols) is extraordinarily rare except among extreme power users and certain high-security corporate environments. Bringing the full power of cryptography to ordinary people, and making it so easy that they don't realize they are using it, is a necessary prerequisite to building the next-generation Internet. Perhaps we need a revival of the cypherpunk movement of the 1990's -- a sort of Cypherpunk 2.0, if you will -- only this time with an emphasis on user interface simplicity that will finally allow cryptographic technology to be accepted by the public and commonly used to provide privacy and authenticity.

The role of writers in injecting a needed dose of imagination and creativity into engineers and entrepreneurs should be taken very seriously. I'm reminded of the story about how the science fiction writer Katherine MacLean, who predicted the role of computers in communication and music in her 1947 novelette Incommunicado, accidentally stumbled into a conference of electrical engineers and found herself quickly surrounded by Bell Telephone researchers who were inspired by her ideas to build the next generation of communications equipment. I hope that the software engineers of today find similar inspiration in the works of visionaries such as Vinge and Stross, and decide that it's time to pull up the shirt sleeves and get to work building the world of tomorrow.

Warning: The following post may contain weak metaphors and bad analogies. If these are offensive to you or illegal in your jurisdiction, you may want to skip this post.

Like many people who grew up in the forward thinking, happy go-lucky days of the twentieth century when anything seemed possible, I sometimes wonder what happened to all the futuristic luxuries that technology was supposed to have delivered by now. Science fiction promised us flying cars, ray guns, personal robots, and space colonies. I can understand speculative fiction not living up to reality -- after all, nobody has a crystal ball. However, many of us who were involved in software during the early to mid-nineties had some very specific and realistic notions of how computing technology would progress over the coming years, including the following:

• Ubiquitous computing. Computers would fade into the woodwork all around us, and human-computer interaction would take place using natural metaphors instead of clunky terminals. In some ways we're slowly moving in that direction, as powerful computers become embedded into mobile phones and other handheld devices, but we're not there yet.
• Transparent cryptography. Cryptography would be seamlessly integrated into our day-to-day communications. Today, you can use cryptography to communicate with your bank's web site or connect to your office's network in a fairly seamless fashion, but the vision was much broader than this -- all network messaging (email, instant messaging, twitter, etc.) would be encrypted to protect the contents from prying eyes, and digitally signed to provide strong assurance of the authenticity of the sender.
• Natural language processing. By this time we should have been able to verbally interact with our ubiquitous computing infrastructure, asking our computers to "turn off the coffee pot that I accidentally left on," "check on the status of my portfolio," "open the pod bay doors," etc. At present, natural language technology still seems clunky and limited.
• Intelligent agents, micropayments, effective and low-cost telepresence, and many others.

Some of the above ideas exist today in a limited fashion, although none have lived up to the potential that we once envisioned. Some ideas require the overcoming of difficult challenges (such as the ideas related to artificial intelligence: natural language processing and intelligent agents), and others are technically solved to a large degree but have not been refined enough to be successful in consumer applications (transparent cryptography and micropayments, for example). I've been mulling over a theory about why these technologies have either failed to become reality, or haven't lived up to our expectations.

In the late twentieth century, technology went through a period of great advancement in capability which outpaced the application of these capabilities as solutions to problems. An entrepreneur who is investigating ideas for a startup company will find a great many tools available, and many unsolved problems. Using existing tools to solve existing problems can be very lucrative, and the entrepreneur will likely chose to deliver these solutions instead of developing new tools. Because there is a finite (although not fixed) amount of innovative energy in the economy, this low-hanging fruit is bound to be picked first. If it's 2004 and you're looking to start a company, which would be more likely to provide a larger and quicker return on investment -- solving the problem of how to richly communicate with friends using established and well-understood web tools (Facebook), or starting an artificial intelligence research and development laboratory that may not bear fruit for years? When the low-hanging fruit becomes scarce, more energy will be spent on the harder problems, and we will be back on track to building the world of tomorrow.

And now, it's time for the bad analogy you've been waiting for. When I think about the temporary diversion of efforts into applications instead of new technologies, I can't seem to shake from my head a graph from high school chemistry class showing enthalpy of vaporization. (Enthalpy can be very roughly defined as the heat content of a thermodynamic system.) When you add energy (heat) to water, its temperature will increase continuously in proportion to the amount of energy added -- until it reaches the boiling point (201°F at any reasonable elevation), at which time the energy is redirected towards the "enthalpy of vaporization" (also called the "heat of evaporation") and the temperature flatlines at the boiling point until vaporization is complete and the energy can once again be used towards increasing the temperature, as seen in this graph:

In a similar fashion, it seems that the technology industry has been in a sort of "enthalpy of application" where energy (effort) has been redirected towards application, and the technology "temperature" has not risen much:

Before anybody accuses me of being hostile towards Web 2.0 companies, let it be clear that I think putting effort into using existing tools to solve problems is just fine and dandy, and this is the natural order of things. (Even if my graphs seem to imply that Facebook is the ramen noodles of technology.) However, it never hurts to try to make sense of these trends. If the current economic downturn begins drying up the low-hanging fruit prematurely, it may be a good idea to begin looking into the grand challenges and long-term endeavors. I'm personally looking forward to working on some of these challenges in the years ahead.