"The computing trend that will change everything", in Technology Review online today
One of my professors in graduate school, John Holdren, had a goal of writing a paper out of every talk he gave. Neither he nor I always accomplished that goal, but his advice stuck with me as something to which to aspire.
After I gave my talk on computing trends at the VERGE conference in DC on March 15th, 2012, I was offered the opportunity to write a short article for a special issue of Technology review. That article appeared online today as part of an entire issue devoted to how information technology and energy interact, and the process of writing it helped me refine my thinking even more. Packing a lot of ideas into an 800 word article isn’t easy, and in the process I learned as much as I did in boiling down my computing trends work down to a 10 minute talk at VERGE.
The main focus of the article is on implications for our ability to collect and use data in real time, at increasingly finer levels of disaggregation. I’m convinced that sensors and controls that harvest ambient energy flows offer a chance to transform how we interact with the universe, and I’m excited to see what new capabilities they will enable in the years ahead.
Here are the opening four paragraphs:
The performance of computers has shown remarkable and steady growth, doubling every year and a half since the 1970s. What most folks don’t know, however, is that theelectrical efficiency of computing (the number of computations that can be completed per kilowatt-hour of electricity used) has also doubled every year and a half since the dawn of the computer age.
Laptops and mobile phones owe their existence to this trend, which has led to rapid reductions in the power consumed by battery-powered computing devices. The most important future effect is that the power needed to perform a task requiring a fixed number of computations will continue to fall by half every 1.5 years (or a factor of 100 every decade). As a result, even smaller and less power-intensive computing devices will proliferate, paving the way for new mobile computing and communications applications that vastly increase our ability to collect and use data in real time.
As one of many examples of what is becoming possible using ultra-low-power computing, consider the wireless no-battery sensors created by Joshua R. Smith of the University of Washington. These sensors harvest energy from stray television and radio signals and transmit data from a weather station to an indoor display every five seconds. They use so little power (50 microwatts, on average) that they don’t need any other power source.
Harvesting background energy flows, including ambient light, motion, or heat, opens up the possibility of mobile sensors operating indefinitely with no external power source, and that means an explosion of available data. Mobile sensors expand the promise of what Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of management at MIT calls “nanodata,” or customized fine-grained data describing in detail the characteristics of individuals, transactions, and information flows.
