Technology and the Human Interface

"Well how fast can you get the program done?" The CEO of the company wasn't a really nice person, but that's probably understandable, he was a C programmer in a JAVA world and if you get that then you know what the answer was likely going to be. "Sir," the programmer's nerves were already frayed, she'd been up most of the night when her eyes hadn't lost focus and she'd put her head down on her cubicle desk to avoid the pain and slept. She went quickly on, "if we keep pushing speed over the quality here, we might be in danger of blowing the whole code, creating some unseen difficulties down the road, and with this much internal looping, there is no telling what we might end up with." Can you guess what his answer was? Saw it too many times to forget it, fast forward to 2010, we're now quadrillions of lines of code later and it's a mess, and nobody, but nobody, wants to touch this one, because it doesn't take a genius to figure out, we're heading for interesting times to say the least.

Quiz - human and computer have to compute the differential between a parallelogram inside a 12 inch square box and the internal remainder of the Isosceles triangle within, who wins? The computer, every time, because the given dimensions allow it a surface to reference. It's a sad truth that the human brain isn't quick, it's flexible, it isn't totally relevant, it is, totally relational, and within that lies the genius of the human versus the machine. Our problem area is where the machine and the human meet in the land of programs written in code, the human is imprinted all over them, the machine is left to figure them out, and today, we have programs which are designed to do, just that.

This isn't going to go the way you are thinking, where we talk about code shutting stuff down and doom and gloom- and that's possible, that my sense is that isn't it. Where this goes is into an area that also combines the science of Cosmology, where Dr. Michio Kaku, points out that we are on the verge of a revolution in outlook with the magnitude of Copernicus. The truth of Cosmology being in a state of flux and computer information systems, as well as, software development and systems in general, being in a state of flux, all combine to indicate a much more rewarding future than we perhaps thought was possible. The comparison here might be one where you'd think of the times when indoor plumbing didn't exist- to today- when plumbing has even taken on artful dimensions. The growth and magnificent result of so much programming heading into other fields of endeavor are unprecedented discoveries. The satellite program which Dr. Kaku lauds is L.I.S.A., due, according to his explanation, to launch in 2011; and of course the obvious point being, that wasn't possible without the codes which were put together by programmers who were ruthlessly (at times) driven to excellence.

The odd part of this entire scenario is that we may come to a point which is massively beyond our ability to cope, we're in some difficult areas now when it comes to behavior, changes in the way that we live and act; those are influenced by technology, for example, the problems of people who text and drive; or, depend upon a no cash way of life, if their credit situation doesn't function as it should? Ever have a credit transaction turned down when you knew full good and well the card was good? That's called a fail point, something happens which shouldn't happen, and because of that, many other things take place. The credit card gets turned down, which angers the customer who leaves the establishment in a hurry and gets into a fender bender (we hope that is all that happens); is an example with low consequence. There are scenes which can have high consequence, nuclear plants, chemical plants and others where large scale damage could result from fail points. We actually have to hope such doesn't take place, because truth is, with all that code out there, nobody is 100% sure of the outcome.