What would be possible if...

Computers were born in the developed world. First they were huge and astronomically expensive. Then they were smaller and still expensive. Now they are tiny and cheap - a whole computer can fit in your hand and costs under $20. We have only begun to explore what this could mean for the world. I intend to explore some possibilities beginning with 3 ideas:

1. Computers will get still smaller and more powerful and require less power.
2. People will get increasingly skilled at making those computers do things
3. Networking those computers will create yet more possibilities.

Before you think this is an IoT story, let me just say I think that the idea of throwing computers into random household objects and waiting for "something" to be the killer app is just silly. The power of computers is not powering your toaster. The power of computers is empowering people. People are the killer app of computers and vice versa.

Accessible compute

Back when I was a kid Intel corporation would advertise their chips on tv showing clean rooms and people dressed head to toe in a white suit. The message was clear: these were chips for powerful people, the anointed experts who ready for the power passed on to them by the experts dressed in the computational burkha. This era is gone, but the idea is still in most people's heads. Caught in this mindset, they are not prepared for what is coming next.

That $20 computer is more powerful than what Intel used to advertise on TV. Access and knowledge about computing is no longer the exclusive domain of the already wealthy and connected. Computation has been democratized, globalized, and nearly universally connected. Consider the fortunes made and ideas realized in the last 30 years that were enabled by computing. That was just the beginning. Those same possibilities are now available increasingly not just to people in the west at prestigious universities but to everyone, everywhere with an internet connection.

That last piece is critical - the hardware is nothing without software to run on it. And the instructions for writing software are on the internet. The value gained from generating software is also generally found on the internet. There are fortunes to be made, ideas to be shared, worlds to be created. Opportunities beyond my imagination. This is why good internet access for everyone is important to me and should be important to everyone, and why increasing pushes to censor, restrict, and control the internet are so upsetting.

What comes next

This next bit just applies to those areas of the world lucky to be stable enough to have working internet and enough resources to do things like buy $20 computers. That's a lot of the world, but sadly far from all of it. Let's just hope that the disconnected world can get there soon.

Every piece of the world has problems. Increasingly, computation and networking offers ways to help solve those problems. Bitcoin and the blockchain are good examples. While bitcoin has tons of advantages discussed on this very site (so I won't go into it here), the blockchain is even more important. And here's a story to illustrate why:

I live in Vietnam. Just today I had a conversation with a man dealing with a condo owners dispute. By contract, they needed the agreement of most people in the building to make changes, but many owners are foreigners and out of the country. How do you let them vote, and how do you make sure nobody has tampered with their vote? The answer: the blockchain. My new found friend was working to use the block chain to solve a problem of government. As an American who sees voting irregularities in my own country and in others I have visited, this makes me smile.

The what ifs...

I don't know the future, but here are the "what ifs" that guide my thinking about what is going to happen next.

1. What if devices got small enough to be interchangeable AND upgradeable, instead of one or another. Small enough that most devices used by people (like phones) had plenty of space to make them modular and user serviceable. Even user designable.
2. What if building interconnected computing machines could be done similar to legos? And kids played with them basically the same way?
3. What if blockchain and similar technologies mixed with a distributed compute fabric - perhaps a global one - allowed "the people" to attack such eternal problems as government corruption, discrimination, or other social ills. I have hope that it might just as ubiquitous cellphone cameras have shed light on police brutality back in the USA.