scorp1us's Journal: Out of Band: Why technology is making life harder

I will now sum up a 4-year computer science degree in 1 sentence: Find the pattern, model it in code. Those who do that stand to benefit enormously.

Computers are very logical, proceedural machines. All the programming is modeling of a process that was once done by a person. Since the proceedure was very definable, with well-defind conflict resolution, these proceedures made good canidates for computer adaptation.

Over the years, more and more things were adapted tot he computer. It has a very accurate math processor, so those apps were done first. Plus there are only a few operations you can do with numbers. Then it was abtracted to objects with well-defined behaviors. This allowed for even morethings to be modeled.

As more and more things were modeled, the computer was doing intelectual grunt work faster, cheaper and more accurately than the people could. Since most people get bored easily, after some inital worries, most people began welcoming computers as labor and error saving devices.

What this did was very quietly and smoothly transition us to handle everythign the computer can't. We don't like proceedure, but we are intelligent - so we can handle the things that don't fit in a computer well. And indeed that is what we do.

Computers and algorithms are ubiquous enough now such that people are just glue code between computer systems. Someone somewhere has to handle a problem that the computer can't. It has to defer to us on how to handle a situation. We after all, know control our world, we care about what goes on. It is us t hat has the wants and needs we programmed the computers to support.

So we have a human handle these "Out of Band" issues. Usually the resolution of these issues ends up in the hands of a person, who doctors it or does what the machine can't yet do, but whatever it is, it's a handling of the exception. Then it's remolded and untered back into the computer.

So we have a food chain with people at the top and a lot of people in the middle. The people at the top start a chain reaction that ripples down. Like a sensory nerve cell firing in a central nervous system. The signal ripples through the nerves, goes to many places, before finding it's ending spot. An exmple is paying bills online. You initialte a transfer, the change ripples through your bank's computer, to another bank's and possibly a third banks. 'Money' ends up changing hands. If anything goes wrong, the computers try to handle it, but failing that, someone of flesh and blood handles it. It could be that the middle bank dropped the transfer. Someone at that back will use a program to start it back up again when you call to complain that it didn't get done.

So we are both at the top and in the middle. A few of us are at the bottom, but er are never peers int he system. People can be peers, but machines are always following our commands, or giving us commands to follow. There is no one that works along side a computer.

Software developers come closest to peers. They know wha tthe computer can and can't do. They make many decisions on how to tructure the program, its input and output and define it's involvement. But for the most part developers are at the top, though they may make decisions due to cimputer implementation details.

So we have effectively managed to produce a system there the monotomy is handled exclusively by computers. Which leaves us to fight the fires that they can't handle. That's why life seems more frantic than ever. They blast along until there's a problem, then it all stops. We bust our butts to resolve it quickly so the computer can get to the next problem. The problem is it can find the next one before we can rest.

It's only going to get worse my friends. Computers will only get faster, finding problems for us to solve faster, and the easiest resolutions will be coded in, leaveing only the hard problems for us to solve.