Blog of a Boston-based IT Consultant

There is a presentation called “Shift Happens” that I find somewhat troublesome. I think I find it troublesome because a few people around me are reacting as though they just watched an Al Gore film and can never see the world the same way again, are forever believers in some kind of cusp upon which civilization stands, with everything it holds dear at stake.

If you like, take a look at it and then see if what I say makes any sense.

• The first thing the author of this slideshow does is let us know that there are a lot of people in the world. This is true (I guess, compared to the past), but so what?
• “The 25 percent of the population in China with the highest IQs…” makes no sense. Therefore, the number that this intends to convey is nonsensical. I think he is trying to say something here, but it doesn’t make sense as worded. Think it through. Can you phrase it in a way that makes sense?
• The top 28 percent of India, stated the same way, makes as little sense as the original statement regarding China. Also, take a look at this.
• The statement that the presentation makes about the aforementioned figures does NOT mean they have more honors kids than we have kids. It means… they have more kids! They might very well all be working in a field. I don’t know, and he doesn’t show me otherwise. Education is completely different in other countries. India emphasizes memorization and regurgitation of fact, not comprehension of theory (a bit of an editorial from a few of my Indian friends). They also do not spend time on creative thinking or the arts. This statement is totally misleading and transparent.
• China may very well have more people who know how to speak English than any other country, but how many of the “English-speaking” Chinese speak it fluently? Even if they did speak it fluently, what does this mean besides that English is becoming a standard, or at least, very popular?
• If we took every job in the US and shipped it to China, there would in fact be a labor surplus, but because the jobs would go unfilled - not because of any other reason.
• A lot of babies are born. A lot more are born in China and India than in the USA. I hope so. There are more people there. But what happens to girl babies in China? What does this statement mean?
• “Today’s learner” will have up to 14 jobs by the age of 38. Okay. How many different summer jobs did you have? I had one each year I was in high school. Actually, one year I had three jobs over the course of one summer. There’s 5 jobs right there. What’s a “job” here? And what is this supposed to mean?
• Half of America’s workers have been with their current company for less than five years. Is this good? Does it mean they keep getting better offers? Or is it bad? Does it mean they keep getting laid off? It means… nothing.
• The top 10 in-demand jobs of 2010 did not exist in 2004. Wow. We can tell the future? This is silliness. This is not due to any crazy shift in anything. This is because the most “in demand” jobs are jobs that deal with emerging technology. Guess what? It’s emerging because it is brand new. To put it succinctly, there were no Microsoft Office 2007 specialists in 2003 because there was no Microsoft Office 2007 in 2003. But still, there were MCSEs and MCPs and people adapted pretty quickly. Things like nanotechnology have existed for longer than a few years. They just were not as well-developed as they are now. No need to worry about kids being unprepared or heading towards a life of unknowns.
• We are preparing students for jobs that dont exist yet because the students are not working yet. A job requires a worker. That is the only reason, other than the aforementioned.
• The USA is 20th in the world in broadband internet penetration. Well, we also have the highest number of broadband subscribers. This is a big country. Luxembourg is not so big.
• Research and Innovation in Education? What is that? Is it a bad thing that we “only” spent 70 million on it? Seems like a little bit more than a little to throw at something that is focused on not Innovation in Education, but RESEARCH AND Innovation in Education. Come on… Besides, how many BILLIONS of dollars has the NSF and other organizations given to research and education in this country? A lot. This is just silly.
• MySpace is not a country. Neither are the number of people who like Star Trek, or the number of people who use Google. There is not a virtual country forming, outside of SecondLife, and even that is taxed by the government of a real country, full of people who have citizenship and passports that mean something in the world. Making comparisons between the number of people with MySpace profiles and the number of people in a country is meaningless. What if MySpace was a country? It’s not. It’s nothing like a country. These are just numbers, meant to stagger people.
• There are a lot of Google searches every month. The author of the slideshow wanted to know how people found answers to their questions before Google. Various ways, and efficiently enough that they built Google, right? Google is a tool, not the end all be all of information. The Semantic Web will be that .
• The author of the Slideshow says that 3,000 new books are published every day. According to Wikipedia, the USA publishes about 70,000 books a year. How many languages, new editions, e-books, and other publications are counted in this figure? What does it mean? It means that there is a lot of *stuff* being documented in different ways and a lot of *stuff* being written. How much of this is sci-fi? How many copies of Dianetics were published? How many variations of “Mary Kate and Ashley go to the Zoo” were written? Is this all vital, meaningful information? I don’t think so.
• A week’s worth of NY Times’ contain more information than a person in the 18th century would come across in their entire lifetime. Okay. Well, they didn’t live as long. They didn’t communicate on a global scale. They didn’t need to know as much stuff, and they were not bombarded by infomercials and Mary Kate and Ashley and Blue’s Clues and nonsense like the presentation I am taking issue with. What does it purport to mean that the paper has more information in it than someone would come across in their lifetime? Are we somehow advanced as a species? Evolved? If so, it isn’t because we have more popup windows than we did 300 years ago.
• 40 exabytes of information will be generated this year. Huh? What does this mean? I think he is talking about disk space here, and as we all know, not everything on the web or printed is suitable for the term “information“.
• The amount of technical information is doubling every 2 years. I don’t understand what this actually means. You can be sure that this does NOT mean what the author goes on to assert: half of what a college student learns will be outdated by their third year. They learned the alphabet first. Then they learned to read. Then they learned to write. The alphabet was still pretty relevant when they were coding AJAX on their Vista machine 17 years later. Also, if so much of this new information is outdated so quickly, who cares? Just take a nap. You will have missed a lot, but only a bit of it will still matter.
• Alcatel has built fiber that carried 10 trillion bits per second. This happened in 2002, and the implications fall a little short of what the presentation would have you believe. Read about their test yourself.
• The aforementioned, super-fast network is doubling in speed every six months. Um… right now, the fastest fiber network is running at 14 terabits per second. This is 14 trillion bps. If Alcatel was doing 10 terabits per second in 2002 and it was doubling every six months, we would be doing quite a bit more than 14 terabits per second now. We would be doing 2560 or so terabits per second.
• Epaper may eventually be cheaper than real paper, but will it be because our technology is so advanced, or because we run out of trees? This doesnt mean anything. It isnt even a real statement. It is a guess.
• The $100 laptop (One Laptop per Child) project just finished making their beta machine. They havent shipped anything yet. What they will do in the future remains to be seen. I wish them luck. There are currently no massive shipments of laptops to children who do not pay (a lot more than $100) for them.
• By 2o10, we will have a computer that can out-compute the human brain. What does this mean? I can just sit back now and rest because in 2010 I will be able to use a computer to go back and do all my thinking for me?
  

This is no more shift than it is progress. And it is no more progress than it is change. Some change is good. Some change is bad.

This is nothing new.

Best,

Josh Milane

MIT Technical, Boston

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