This post originally appeared in October, 2006

In the last post, I seem to have given all the credit to wireless communication, saying that it led to the ultimate speedup. Yet I contend that computers are a key ingredient to what we are observing today. And here I will explain why I think so.

Wile the invention of wireless communication (and indeed, electronic communication in general) was indeed a quantum leap, it speeded up only part of the process of change. Change is the result of two very distinct activities. One is, of course, the dissemination of ideas/information. Clearly, however, there is the creation of ideas/information that is a critical activity. Speed-of-light communication allowed the quick transportation of information. However, now the bottleneck in the process of change shifted from transport of information to the generation of information. Initially, this is where computers created the greatest impact.

Computers were mammoth machines crunching numbers at phenomenal speed. Suddenly it became possible to make sense of a much larger amount of information. This naturally led to a greater speed of generating ideas. These ideas could be related to particle physics or national demographics. Calculations which would take days could now be done in a matter of hours, allowing new ideas to be tested much more quickly. Printing presses and electronic communication allowed data and research papers to be sent around the world at tremendous speeds while computers allowed the validation and generation of new ideas. Part of this research fed back into developing better and faster computers, better storage technologies and reliable communication technologies. Now both components of change were operating at superhuman speeds. The plan was set. What we are observing today is this result of an interplay of this tremendous computing power and communication speed developed by man over the millennia in a series of steps that would seem only natural.

At this point I would like to reiterate something that is oft forgotten in any discussion of technology. It is the fact that communication speed-up is a phenomenon quite distinct from the increase in raw computing power, which are in turn quite distinct from the increase in our capacity to store information. It is true that these three forces affect each other dramatically and often depend on each other for their own growth. However, keeping this fact in mind can help us understand much of this apparently chaotic change around us much more easily.