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2015 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

11. Informational Revolution: Personal Computers and the Internet

verfasst von : Andrzej P. Wierzbicki

Erschienen in: Technen: Elements of Recent History of Information Technologies with Epistemological Conclusions

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Three main megatrends of the informational revolution were discussed in Chap. 2. Since more specific aspects of this revolution are discussed in the followings sections, here I would like to concentrate on caesurae and important events. Later, the chapter discusses personal computers, computer networks, mobile telephony, Internet and network services, artificial intelligence and cognitivism, human centred computing and knoledge engineering, intellectual property rights and the tendency to privatize intellectual heritage of humanity, binary logics versus logical pluralism.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Systems Theory, Theory of Chaos, Emergence

Nächstes Kapitel Creative Space and Micro-Models of Knowledge Creation

First in 1985, even if I bought it and used in Austria earlier; after computer networks had been declassified, embargo on high technology products became less stringent, thus I could bring this computer to Poland.

In that time, I was using both the example of Apple II computer brought by me to Poland and the arguments from the Tofflers book The Third Wave (1980); in this book, Tofflers actually predicted the fall of the communist system (although worded this prediction cautiously) to convince the political leaders of Poland about the necessity of a democratic turn. The necessity of a market turn was already known to them, but could not be implemented because of the embargo; the arguments of Tofflers were more convincing than mine, because nobody is a prophet in his own country.

As usual, the authorship of this concept is contested. The formulation information society was used earlier (1963) by another Japanese, Tadao Umesao. See also (Zacher 2007; Wydro 2008).

I participated in these developments personally, among others as a member of ISTAG (Information Society Technology Advisory Group) of the European Commission.

See http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-940713.html.

The meaning of these concepts changes with time. A working station before 1980 was a terminal connecting an employee of a large company to the main computer of this company, called mainframe. After 1981, IBM PC were often used as working stations, and desktop meant that they were typically situated on a desk. To the contrary, a laptop described a mobile personal computer, with many other versions, such as notebook, netbook, palmtop; today, tablets are evidently the most popular mobile personal computers. At home, a desktop evolved to a home theatre PC with a large screen to watch films or play games.

After taking into account intellectual property rights, which is discussed in a separate point, we can imagine even a creative activity consisting in editing and creating new versions of classical films, naturally with references to the source material.

One of examples of the actual improvement of the position of women, enabled by the computer use, is the success of a married Japanese woman (in Japan, married women usually stay at home) in financial investments via the Internet.

As usual, we encounter a dispute here as to who was the author of the idea. Timothy Berners-Lee maintains that he created WWW independently, even if the basic ideas were actually much older. Theodor Nelson criticises the HTML language saying that it uses unacceptable simplifications that he wanted to avoid. Vannevar Bush did not use the terms hypertext or hyperlink, even if he described a corresponding organization of information.

If we use the example of hypertext to count the delay between the concept and its broad social use, the delay amounts to 47 years.

We should note here that in (1958), Simon and Newell predicted that in 10 (!) years a computer will become a chess world champion, but it actually happened 40 years later. On the other hand, in 1986, Dreyfus brothers from Berkeley University suggested (in their excellent book Mind over Machine, compare Chap. 5) that such an event is not probable.

The idea is actually much older, since the same principle has been used in integrating elements in analog computers since 1931, see Chap. 8.

The delay between the original concept and mass social penetration, depending on how we count it, amounts in this case to 50–90 years.

The GSM standard was eventually, if slowly accepted in Europe, while in the USA a fight developed between the companies preferring two similar CDMA and TDMA standards, which delayed the development of 2G mobile telephony.

The generations of mobile telephony differ mostly in the way they use radio spectrum and in the services they offer, but also in their standards and technical details that are not discussed here. In 1G, the analog standards NMT, AMPS were applied; 2G used mostly GSM with diverse bands of radio spectrum; 3G uses, e.g., IMT-2000, UMTS; 4G is mostly under development. There are also differences in the ways of separation of channels, such as Wireless Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA), or Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), TD-CDMA, FDMA.

Telematics has a slightly different and broader meaning in the field of automatic control, which is closely related to telecommunication, but nevertheless different. In automatic control, telematics means a distant control which requires a broader range of real time data transmission techniques than only transmission of a fixed text or picture.

If we apply tools of automatic ontological engineering to a large repository of texts from telecommunications, we will obtain a statement that a network consists of nodes and connections between them, true and obvious for any telecommunication specialists, but how can it help a specific user?

Which means that no single criterion value could be improved without worsening the value of some other criterion.

This is a specialized and not broadly used distinction: a value function means an aggregation of diverse criteria without taking uncertainty into account, a utility function performs such aggregation while taking it into account.

For example, I did not ask the permission of Lawrance Lessig to quote and discuss his opinions, but I do not think that he would have something against it.

See, e.g., http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html.

Indirectly, it is possible to check whether these prices correspond to prices typical for an oligopolistic market; it is necessary to compute, using the game theory, what would be the price on oligopolistic market and how much it can differ from marginal production cost. We must know the market share coefficient of a company, κ, and the elasticity of demand with respect to price, ε, to obtain p = m _c /(1−κ/ε), where p is an oligopolistic competitive price, and m _c is marginal production cost (that is, the competitive price on an ideal free market), see e.g. Kameoka and Wierzbicki (2005). If the actually observed price deviates widely from such estimation, this suggests that there is an explicit or tacit cartel price agreement and anti-monopolistic proceeding should be implemented.

The concept of discrete time has led to the question whether the physical time is truly continuous, or, similarly as mass or energy, it has a discrete, quantum character. The assumption of discrete time might give a more consistent models of quantum physics, since nonlinear systems with discrete time easily generate chaotic behaviour (as already discussed in Chap. 10) even if they are deterministic; hence the assumption about indeterminism of the universe could be treated as a result of nonlinearity and of discrete time, not as an ad hoc assumption. Recall the statement of Albert Einstein: God does not play dice with the universe.

This principle was traditionally called contradiction principle, even if it actually is a noncontradiction principle (and the latter name is used contemporarily). I have quoted above the so-called ontological version of this principle; Łukasiewicz distinguished also its logical version and a psychological version, the belief in the veracity of the noncontradiction principle.

It is telling that at the end of his life Bertrand Russell complained about the readership of his fundamental work Principia Mathematica (Russel 1910–1913), saying that with a true understanding this work was read by only perhaps seven people in the world, while three of them were Poles.

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Titel: Informational Revolution: Personal Computers and the Internet
verfasst von: Andrzej P. Wierzbicki
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Technen: Elements of Recent History of Information Technologies with Epistemological Conclusions
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09032-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-09033-7

Copyright-Jahr: 2015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09033-7_11

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