Human History and the Internet

I was doing some light reading last night on some historial events that occured in the past century and I came across a number of first hand accounts on USENET of events that took place around thirty years ago. It got me thinking about how our history has been, is and will be documented.

When I studied history at high school a lot of emphasis was placed on importance of source documents, in ancient history we were often talking about engravings on walls and tablets as well as well preserved pieces of parchment whereas in more recent times we have digital records which can be easily duplicated and don’t suffer the effects of errosion over time.

Still – it occurs to me that those engravings on walls and tablets have lasted thousands of years, what is to say that the digital records we have today will survive the constant churn that occurs on the Internet. Which sites can we point to and say here is a permanent record of humanity?

Certainly Wikipedia is a contender here, but it misses out on some of the really interesting tidbits which come from subjective first hand accounts. For example, one of the most interesting stories about Otto von Bismarck was that when he had visitors he would put a shot through their window if they didn’t wake up at an appropriately early hour.

I have no idea if this story is true or not, but there must be some source document that provides a first hand account. The problem is, as people that know about this story disappear the possibility that it will be added to Wikipedia diminish – and a great story that helps shape perception of the man is lost.

The Steady Pace of Automation

This is one of the posts that I wanted to make while I was on my blogging hiatus; the impetus to write it came about as I was thinking how a change in the way an existing piece of software was designed could give my parents more free time.

Of course, as a programmer I am often tasked with developing software which automates some kind of process. Increasingly the processes that are being automated are completely new and could never be done by a human – this is technology creating new opportunities.

But this isn’t necessarily the case all the time. Sometimes we automate a process which was performed manually and we are just finding a more efficient way of doing it. Efficiency in this case is defined as a ratio of the capital invested and the revenue received.

Computers make it possible to perform some processes incredibly quickly so if your level of revenue received is increased the faster the process is performed then computers are definately the tool for you. More often than not however, when asked to automate an existing manual process we are usually looking at taking some segment of the workforce and making then redundant as a way of reducing the cost of providing the service.

I am no bleeding heart but the question does need to be asked – what are the implications of using technology to automate a process that will cause redundancy in the workforce? The rhetoric is that an organisation can take these staff and redeploy them productively.

The counter to the redeployment argument is that certain parts of the workforce can not, or will not support reskilling. If I am an employee who has been made redundant and my employer has given me the opportunity to be productive elsewhere in the organisation – who’s fault is it if I fail?

To me its a question that speakes to ones personal political leanings, but I doubt that many developers have turned down an automation job because it will put people out of work (we have to make a crust too).

Ultimately I think we are approaching a day when our day to day tasks are completely automated and we are left with time to use our human potential to tackle greater challenges. That old Caddyshackism – “someone has to dig ditches and flip burgers” may not always be true.

Happy New Year!

Well, given that it is the 1st of January 2006 I guess I am allowed to make a post to my blog now. I can tell you now that breaking the blogging habit for a month is actually quite difficult because you see things that you feel that you just need to tell the world about.

Now for a bit of an update on what has been happening with the Denny clan. On the 14th of December we all jumped on a plane to go up to Queensland to stay with my folks over the Christmas period. They recently added an extension to their house which I had seen when it was partially completed.

The place is now big enough that I am half expecting a cult to come along and buy it and then it’ll only be a matter of months before the tanks roll across the lawn in a Waco-style incident. Actually, the house is on one of the feeder creeks to the Bribie passage so Bella managed to go down and take a swim almost every day with either myself or “grandad”.

It was interesting to see the composition of the water change while we were there. When we arrived there was quite a bit of silt in the water and it was close to fresh due to some recent rainfall in the area. However, over the course of the three weeks to cleared up quite a bit and became quite salty. Bella didn’t like that too much so perhaps it is just as well that we didn’t get out to the beach while we were there – the trip was called off due in part to a mild Asthma attack that I had and also the beaches being closed because of “stingers” – Jellyfish.

We got back to Canberra on Thursday last week and since then we have been doing a bit of a spring (summer?) clean. The weather is just perfect for Redback spiders at the moment and quite a few LARGE ones have taken up residence outside. I spent this morning making out back courtyard safe enough for Bella to play in.

Right now I am sorting through various bits of paper work and trying to figure out what is on the file of unlabeled CD’s sitting on my desk. Its interesting when you uncover e-mail archives from eight years ago and code snippets that you wrote against the “NGWS” SDK that was dropped circa PDC 2000.

Anyway – I’ve queued a few post “ideas” while I was away so I will work through them slowly and post them up. Nothing terribly technical in nature but hopefully it’ll be an interesting enough read.