Cranes and Computers

An Uninteresting Story

Last week I made a mistake. I had just run a series of mechanical turk HITs to collect 20,000 images for a project I was running at work. I looked at the images I collected from the mturk run and realized that they all had an extra number added to the name, which I had to get rid of.

I tried to make an automator application to rename the images. Unfortunately I missed a step when I wrote it. It was the step that chose where to deposit the images after they had been renamed. My desktop slowly started adding the jpegs to my desktop 50 at a time, until it promptly decided it was gettin’ real tired of my shit. I restarted my computer, but my desktop wouldn't load and I was screwed.

It took a couple of awesome folks at the startup I work at (thanks Amy and John!) to finally rid my desktop of the jpeg infection and allow my desktop to be clean happy and healthy once again. As I got back to work, I had this realization: computers are a lot like cranes.

Powerful and Empowering

Millennia ago, to build something big, you had to recruit thousands of people to push, pull and position building components into place. As an architect you were constrained by the limited ability of human strength to move and position building materials: its probably not possible to build a conventional skyscraper with marble slabs and human strength as the force to move them. Today, i’d guess it takes less than 10 people to lift and position a large building component onto the most obscenely tall and complex buildings that were unbuildable a century ago.

A computer is like a crane for the mind. Just as a crane allows you to quickly do the work of many muscles in one machine, a computer quickly does calculations and runs operations that would require the work of many brains. There are two key similarities between the cranes and computers:

  1. Both are powerful, lifting heavy things
  2. Both are empowering, allowing you to build new kinds of things
Computers do work that would normally require the thinking power of thousands of human minds, and empower us to design new applications and tools that could not function on human brain power alone. A crane is to muscles what a computer is to the brain.

Limits

We may have reached or are approaching a limit in crane technology (there are only so many ways to lift heavy things into the sky). Personally, I can't tell much of a difference between the cranes of 1953 and the cranes of 2013, yet the differences between the appearance and functionality of computers in the last decade alone is enormous. Crane innovation is constrained by the laws of physics. I don't think computers are constrained the same way.

Computers, tablets and phones included, have changed from stationary grey boxes, to sleek, elegant, mobile machines that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the large grey boxes ever were. I'm sure more technical people could fill volumes explaining more of the differences between computing today vs years past. As far as I know, there is no reason to believe that innovation computing is going to slow down.

What does this mean for society going forward? I'm not sure, but with all the construction going on in our cities and on the web, it might be a good time for young people to learn how to operate a crane or a computer.

At Your Fingertips

Blowing up my desktop was a valuable lesson for me about the capabilities of computers to be constructive if used well, and destructive if not. Luckily, when you make a mistake with your computer, its much more reversible than a crane dropping a slab of concrete on an incomplete skyscraper. 

The possibilities at your fingertips to produce and innovate are immense,  and while I still will use my computer mostly for the word processor and looking at funny things on Reddit, I've definitely gained a new appreciation for computers and hackers.

Thanks to Andrew Muller and Adam Windman for reading/editing drafts.