Page 76 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

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It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened
the day’s toil of any human being. • John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

resources. A very different approach has arisen recently, High confidence infrastructure control systems;
called peer-to-peer architecture—for example, the music- Improved patient safety and health quality;
file-sharing programs like Napster that link personal Informed strategic planning for long-term regional
computers over the Web, in which each computer simul- climate change;
taneously functions as both server and client. The grid Nanoscale science and technology: explore and ex-
computing concept distributes big computation jobs ploit the behavior of ensembles of atoms and mole-
across many widely distributed computers, or distributes cules;
data across many archives, eroding the distinction Predicting pathways and health effects of pollutants;
between individual computers and the Internet. Real-time detection, assessment, and response to nat-
ural or man-made threats;
The Era of Ubiquitous Safer, more secure, more efficient, higher-capacity,
Computing multimodal transportation system;
Computers today are found nearly everywhere, embed- Anticipate consequences of universal participation in
ded in automobiles and grocery store checkout counters, a digital society;
or packaged as pocket-sized personal digital assistants Collaborative intelligence: integrating humans with
that allow a user to send e-mail or surf the Web from intelligent technologies;
almost anywhere.They have begun to take over the roles Generating insights from information at your fingertips;
of traditional devices such as telephones and televisions, Managing knowledge-intensive dynamic systems;
while other devices have become accessories to comput- Rapidly acquiring proficiency in natural languages;
ers, notably cameras and music players. Old forms of SimUniverse [educational computer simulations]:
computing do not die, but expand. Children’s toys now learning by exploring; and
have vastly greater computing power than ENIAC, but Virtual lifetime tutor for all.
ENIAC’s direct descendents are supercomputers capable
William Sims Bainbridge
of doing dozens of trillions of calculations per second.
Computer science continues to advance, and nan- See also Mass Media
otechnology promises to sustain Moore’s Law for per-
haps another twenty years, halting only after the smallest
electronic components have shrunk to the size of a single Further Reading
molecule. Two decades of doubling every eighteen Austrian, G. D. (1982). Herman Hollerith: Forgotten giant of information
processing. New York: Columbia University Press.
months means improvement by a factor of 8,000. That
Bainbridge, W. S. (Ed.). (2004). Berkshire encyclopedia of human-
would imply the computing power of today’s desktop computer interaction. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing
computer packaged in a shirt button and costing a dime. Group.
Berners-Lee, T., & Fischetti, M. (1999). Weaving the Web. New York:
What will people do with such power? HarperCollins.
In 2003, the Interagency Working Group on Infor- Freiberger, P., & Swaine, M. (1999). Fire in the valley:The making of the
personal computer (2nd. ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
mation Technology Research and Development of the
Gibson, W., & Sterling, B. (1991). The difference engine. New York:
U.S. government identified the following “grand chal- Bantam.
lenges” that computing could address in the following Gillies, J., & Cailliau, R. (2000). How the Web was born. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
decade: Grudin, J. (2004). History of human-computer interaction. In W. S. Bain-
bridge (Ed.), Berkshire Encyclopedia of human-computer interaction.
Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.
Knowledge environments for science and engineering;
Interagency Working Group on Information Technology Research and
Clean energy production through improved combustion; Development. (2003). Grand challenges: Science, engineering, and