Unfit for Purpose by Adam Hart

Author:Adam Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472971012
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Chapter Six

Crippling Networks

In the previous chapter I developed the idea that the modern world is full of stresses and that many of these stresses have come about recently. A good proportion of the stresses we met during our ‘typical’ modern day were focused on something that virtually all of us now take so much for granted that it becomes very difficult to imagine life without it: the mobile phone. Whether it is ‘hassle’ from social network notifications or the ‘always on’ culture that phone-based email and enhanced connectivity promotes, it is clear that the mobile, and the virtual world that it enables us to connect with, might be problematic. It is not surprising that we are having trouble coping with this revolution because our phones connect us to the world in ways that even our most recent ancestors (and unless you are a very young reader, I am talking about our parents) could not imagine. Before considering the problems that such technology can cause, and why they stem from an evolutionary history that has adapted us for a very different world, it is worth taking a moment just to realise how powerful those beeping, vibrating, stressful, distracting hunks of plastic, metal, silicon and rare earth minerals really are.

A short history of your phone

If you are aware of any computing in the 1980s you will likely have heard of the Cray-2 supercomputer. In 1985 it was the fastest machine in the world, an absolute beast of a processor used for the sort of applications and organisations that get thriller writers all of a shiver: nuclear weapons research and secret sonar testing for NASA and the United States Government. It was used for other things as well, like designing Ford cars and for less classified research in universities. The Cray-2 was the powerful computer of the mid-1980s and yet the iPhone nestling in your pocket is far more powerful. Even the now outdated iPhone 4 had nearly three times the processing power of the mighty Cray-2, and there is absolutely no doubt which device had a better video camera or produced better graphics. Also, with its hefty footprint and need for a complex built-in cooling system the Cray-2 was not exactly pocket-friendly. You might complain about the power consumption of your mobile phone but the Cray-2 needed 200kW, equivalent in car terms to 268 brake horsepower or about the power of a full-spec Land Rover Discovery Sport. In 1969 NASA put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon and guided Michael Collins (in my opinion the most interesting of the three Apollo 11 astronauts) around the Moon to pick them up again using a combined computing power that could be matched by just two Nintendo Entertainment Systems, used by the serious gamer back in the Cray-2’s heyday. The latest mobile phones have processing power that is so much greater than NASA in 1969 that it’s hardly worth comparing, but if you’re interested, the nearly 30kg (66lb) guidance computer onboard the Command Module had a processing speed of 0.

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