Rate of Change

(This starts in the middle of a discussion – ramblings which form part of a personal letter)

I’m not necessarily arguing that all these things need to be included or that they all have to be combined in some way. Some seem more appropriate for different historical periods and societies.

Rate of change - Power

Rate of change: (hp/head or dhpperhead/dt) I like it! At the very least it is a useful component of whatever index or indexes you might want to create. To use the George Box criteria, of course it is “wrong” (incomplete, imperfect) but it is certainly useful. You could apply this to any period from pre-1066 to the present. You can also apply it to different societies. For that matter, there must be points at which people first started to use energy other than muscle power (wind and water), and there is long lead-in with people converting heat to mechanical power, starting with Hero of Alexandria and really getting going with steam power during the Industrial Revolution. Identifying those points in different societies would be an interesting challenge in itself.

While the thing itself is interesting, the rate-of-change would certainly give one measure of technological change. Actually that seems like a good point in itself: the measure of the “thing” is useful, but so is the rate-of-change dthing/dt. I think I’ll come back to that.

Before we leave “energy” or hp, I think there is another aspect to look at. I think we need to have a measure of the ability to concentrate or harness (good choice of word) energy under the direction of one person. For example: the harnessing of animals – that increased the average amount of energy available in a society, but probably just as significantly it increased the amount of energy a single individual could bring to bear on a task. This argument extends to wind-power (especially sailing ships, but also windmills) and water-power. I’m not quite sure what the measure is, but it’s something like “amount that one person can control”, so, to pick up your Tesco car park analogy, it’s not just the power of all those cars (and everything else) averaged over society, but the average power of the individual engines and maybe the power of the largest engine. This allows you to look at the technological impact of: harnessing rowers and animals and sails and then steam engines. The concentration measure is important but becomes a bit tricky when you start trying to take into account power stations and the like.

Rate of Change – Transport

Transport is something you would want to consider as an “index”. In many ways the story of the Industrial Revolution in Britain was the story of “Transport”. You can see that in Turnpike roads, Canals, Railways and Shipping.

The measures here are the size (but average or maximum?) of thing you can move and the speed at which you can move it. You probably want to consider both people and goods too.

Here we can see the pattern repeating: the measure itself is interesting, but the rate at which it is changing at any time is interesting too. Take random points in the 15^th to 20^th Centuries and that is clear. You can also usefully indicate the dates at which technologies were discovered or applied.

Whatever the details of the design of the transport related indexes, you find something surprising. Concentrating on “The Western World” (whatever that is), I think there is a plateaux recently. This is stability not stagnation though.

(Here is one place that your “Concorde Moment” comment becomes relevant. Clarkson does speak sense sometimes)

If we look at Transport in the last part of the 20^th Century we can see a sort of stability.

·         Aircraft (commercial) fly at typically 350 knots, because that is the fuel efficient speed for current designs. That hasn’t changed for some time.

·         The size of Cargo ships is determined by “Panamax” dimensions, the size that will fit through two “eyes of a needle”. There are bigger ships but for the time being most are below this size.

·         The size and speed of trucks is really determined by the roads and the drivers. These things may change, but there has been stability for decades.

·         The maximum speed of cars on the road. The restriction is by speed limits, but they are also recognition of the competence of drivers.

·         The actual average speed of traffic is limited by congestion.

These things have not stagnated. They are improving, becoming more efficient and cheaper to run but any likely Transport indexes would probably show them as being on a plateaux, and consequently the rate-of-change being low.

Rate of Change – Communication

Communication is an area where we are seeing change. By “Communication” I mean the ability to get a message (definition problem again) from one place to another. For a long while “Transport” and “Communication” were synonymous. You gave a message to a messenger and it travelled by the appropriate means of transport until it was delivered at the far end.

That has changed. One lot of changes were organisational (things like The Penny Post) and another lot are technological. The technological changes might be considered starting with smoke signals and flags, but there are some really significant milestones with wired and broadcast technology: Telegraphs, telephones, the internet.

For the measures here I want to consider size of message and speed transmission (I think I’ll ignore reliability and security though they might be interesting). Of course the rate-of-change is as interesting as the values themselves.

What surprises me when I start to think about communication in this way is how “stable” it has been in some aspects. This may surprise you too, so let me explain.

I’m sending you a letter (over quite a distance too). If I had done this any time up to the 19^th (ish) Century it would have taken a long time, been expensive and unreliable. When the “Post” was established that became much cheaper and more reliable. In Edwardian times it would probably take a few days to get a letter from rural Ireland to rural Wales if it was one “gentleman” talking to another. The same letter is now delivered in less than a second, but the time is taken up by producing and consuming the content (which are probably the same as they were before). There is a hint there that we are asymptotically approaching some value.

At least two things have changed though: one is the nature and size of what I can communicate (I can send or converse with sound, video and suchlike. I can even send you whole book if I choose.). The second is the access to the communication channels. My fast mail service was only available to Edwardian gentlemen. Access was rationed by physical availability (you needed to be near a post box) and cost.

I’ve been a user of various computer networks over the years, and they have become easier to access. The internet is available to everyone I know.

This suggests to me that I want to consider some additional factors or indexes to describe access to communication.

Rate of Change – Information Storage

Information Storage is something which I think is important, but I don’t know how to characterise. As with the other things I’ve listed so far, you can trace how changes in technology have changed how we can store and access information. The base characteristic I would start with are: “volume” (number of characters of data, but I’m dubious about ‘a picture being worth a thousand words or bytes’) and I would also add characteristics based on speed of access and “accessibility”.

One way of looking at this you could say that we have access to an exponentially increasing volume of information. As a counter to that, already people argue that we have information overload. Here is the problem – the machines can store the data, the machines can process the data, but each human being can only consume so much. Viewed in a certain way I think we may be approaching a sort-of asymptote again. The restriction is not how much we can store or how quickly we can serve it up, but how quickly can we consume it. We may be approaching the situation of being in an “all you can eat” restaurant. Yes, there is more data available, but do we want to consume it? How much do you want or need to eat?

There seems to be “something to measure” here, and once it is pinned down, the way it is changing will be even more interesting. I have a suspicion that the results may spring a surprise on us, because of the limitations of human beings.

Rate of Change – Information Processing

The “volume of information” problem leads into the next area where we might need to consider some sort of measurement. If we use “Energy” as a metaphor, there was a time, in the 19^th Century, when the only computing power anyone had access to was inside of someone’s head! That is just like the “muscle based” energy economy.

This situation has changed dramatically, from the second half of the 20^th Century forward. The old “there’s more power in my phone than…” is true, but it is a challenge to decide how to measure it, and that is before you start calculating a rate-of-change. MIPs (millions of instructions per second) are useless (!) except as a gee-wizz number. Comparing different computer architectures like that simply doesn’t work.

However you consider measuring it, there you come back to wanting to have numbers for both “an overall average” (total computing power/population), and the quantity an individual has access to. I think there is a qualitative difference between, “my share” of the mega-whatever that does the weather forecasting in Bracknell, my mobile phone (which is a highly specialised computer and the PC I program (which is a more general purpose machine). What there is not in doubt is that the power of all 3 is shooting up according to Moore’s Law! You can probably also say that access to everything except the weather forecasting has been getting easier (more people have mobile phones, more people have PCs).

Summary

I think there are a number of things or “dimensions” which I think you might want to consider in your “Change” assessment:

• ·         Power/Energy – Your suggestion, and a good one
• ·         Transport
• ·         Communication
• ·         Information Storage
• ·         Information processing 

For each of these we should probably consider:

• ·         Absolute total value, averaged over the population
• ·         Amount an individual can “leverage” (ghastly phrasing)
• ·         Ease of access

·         For all of these values we are probably more interested in the rate of change than the absolute value.

Some of these dimensions seem to become more relevant at different time periods as technology enables people to use machines to do something. “Energy” seems to become especially relevant from around the start of the Industrial Revolution, and “Information Storage” and “Information Processing” became especially relevant from the middle of the 20^th Century. With all these things it is not possible to say that something starts at a particular moment, but it is possible to point at some indicative “punctuation marks” (“Stockton and Darlington Railway”).

When I started writing this, I was tempted to try and combine all these factors into one “super index”. I’ve moved away from that, because:

• ·         All the dimensions are subject to real problems with deciding what to measure and what units to use.
• ·         Combining them together would introduce weighting factors which would be suspect.
• ·         Applying any of these ideas across populations which are not homogeneous is problematic.

While writing this I’ve noticed something about the dimensions themselves:

• ·         They’re “technology related”.
• ·         Just because something new and relevant turns up, doesn’t mean the old stuff ceases to be relevant.
• ·         Predicting what they are in advance of them becoming relevant is very hard if not impossible.
• Some of the dimensions seem to have reached plateaux. This may not be due to the fundamental characteristics of the technology, but may be due to an accepted limitation (Panamax or railway bridges) or the ability of the market to consume whatever it is.

I think the criticism that these are all “technology related” is valid. There are all things which are worth exploring, but they do not represent everything. For many people they are not the most important.

(Stand-alone ramblings for a letter: 12th January 2017 – 2062 words)