You know what I dearly love about attending Tech Field Day events? They aren’t just about humdrum, boots-on-the-ground problems we deal with every day. I found myself re-energized about what IT technology can accomplish for humanity at large after hearing more about the history of what we call The Cloud; tireless efforts to preserve trillions of web pages since the Internet’s inception; and just how tiny and precious our pale blue dot is when compared to the vastness of the universe.
The Cloud: A Brief History of Irrational Exuberance
Tom Lyon, an historian of computer science who has been programming since the early 1960s and co-founded DriveScale, stepped up to give us a totally different perspective versus how most of us delegates have probably thought about the current state of all things Cloud – public, private, hyper-scaled, neo-cloud, you name it – but posited that what we call The Cloud these days actually has its genesis nearly a century ago.
The interesting part? We’re really just ending yet another cycle of what Tom posits he and other keen observers call irrational exuberance as the famed AI hype cycle plays out.
Tom noted hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Oracle, and Microsoft have built a house of cards around unbelievably rosy projections of AI growth possibilities, furthered by complex accounting tricks like special purpose vehicles to hide debt on their balance sheets. I commented that I’m just waiting for some 70-something investor to pop up at a shareholder’s meeting to shout at Larry Ellison, Satya Nadella, or Sundar Pichai Excuse me, but are you on crack?
The Real Ministry of Truth. Apologies to Winston Smith.
The continuing degradation of objective truth in the modern world has severe implications for policy-making, corporate planning, and history at large. It’s impossible to ignore the erasure of large swaths of scientific data about everything from climate change to basic public health that continues in real time.
Without the Wayback Machine, many USA government websites’ content that’s been effectively erased by the current administration in Washington. That’s why it’s so crucial to preserve the Internet’s billions of pages of content created over the last 40 years since the World Wide Web was born. We’ve all seen how governments, politicians, and oligarchs have attempted recently to discard uncomfortable truths – everything from the denigration of the 1619 Project’s attempts to document how slavery played a key part of the founding of the American Experiment to recommended standards for nutrition, vaccine scheduling, and disease prevention.
There’s No Intelligent Life Here. Do Look Up!
It’s easy to get discouraged about the current state of humanity, but I found my faith restored during our visit to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in nearby Mountain View.
We took a tour of the SETI offices after we chatted with Dr. Christina Ricci about the humongous scope of the universe and the mediums they’re searching for evidence of industrialized and advanced civilizations. She explained the famous Drake Equation which explains just how likely we tiny humans are likely to find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, if we just look hard enough. It might even happen in our lifetimes … and it would utterly transform the way humanity thinks about itself once we know we are truly not alone in the universe.
Dr. Vishal Gajjar explained how his efforts at SETI deploys artificial intelligence – really, complex machine learning algorithms trained across exabytes of radio and visual astronomy – are being actively applied to determine if there really are advanced civilizations in our galactic backyard. One of the most fascinating ideas involves looking for evidence of construction of mind-bogglingly huge structures like Dyson spheres surrounding exoplanets and stars across years of collected data in both EM and visible light spectrums.
Of course, I had to buy a couple of t-shirts to support their efforts. 🤯
