By J. H. Saltzer, January 31, 1997, updated February 4, 1997.

• Who is this guy? Does he have any special qualifications to be talking about these issues?

  (Apparently yes. This is from the biographical sketch prepared for the 1996 conference on "Society and the Future of Computing":

  Robert W. Lucky
  Corporate Vice President
  Applied Research
  Bellcore [Bellcore has since become Telcordia]

  "[He] attended Purdue University, where he received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1957, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1959 and 1961. After graduation he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ, where he was initially involved in studying ways of sending digital information over telephone lines. The best known outcome of this work was his invention of the adaptive equalizer - a technique for correcting distortion in telephone signals which is used in all high speed data transmission today. The textbook on data communications which he co-authored became the most cited reference in the communications field over the period of a decade.

  At Bell Labs he moved through a number of levels to become Executive Director of the Communications Sciences Research Division in 1982, where he was responsible for research on the methods and technologies for future communication systems. In 1992 he left Bell Labs to assume his present position at Bellcore."

  Dr. Lucky is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is also a consulting editor for a series of books on communications through Plenum Press. He has been on the advisory boards or committees of many universities and government organizations, and was Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the United States Air Force from 1986-1989. He was the 1987 recipient of the prestigious Marconi Prize for his contributions to data communications, and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Purdue University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has also been awarded the Edison Medal of the IEEE and the Exceptional Civilian Contributions Medal of the U.S. Air Force.

• Is the journal reputable? (IEEE Spectrum is the flagship publication--but not really a journal--of the International Institute of Electrical Engineers, an organization of about 100,000. It doesn't carry high-density technical papers--other IEEE journals do that instead--, but rather things of broad interest to all electrical engineers, and computer people. The materials in its pages are usually written by its own staff rather than by engineers in the field. People expect things appearing in Spectrum to be competent. This column is unusual, in that it is written by someone not on their staff.)

• If we are all bozos, and the 16-year-old kids are the competition, is there any point in going to M.I.T. and studying 6.033? (Lucky has overdrawn the argument just a bit, or order to make the point very clear. This is a common, and useful, exposition strategy, but you must be careful not to get carried away by helpful analogies.)

• So exactly what is the line of reasoning Lucky is suggesting? (
  1. Technology is changing very fast.
  2. Even the experts can't absorb change that fast.
  3. Predicting what is coming doesn't work.
  4. Non-experts have just as good a chance of coming up with the next good idea.)

• What makes prediction (whether by experts or amateurs) so difficult in the computer and communications business? (When things change by 10% your model probably still holds; you can estimate the impact and trace the propagation of effects. When they change by a factor of two your model is probably too crude and some "latent" effects (effects that were always there but not previously noticed) will begin to dominate. When things change by a factor of ten you need a whole new design. But it takes time to work out a new design, and in the computer business, by the time you have it working the ground rules will have changed again. So the time-scales for system building and the time-scales for technology innovation are out of kilter with each other)

• What can you do about it? (Noone has a good answer. Simpler systems, which can be taken from concept to prototype to the field in a shorter time, are probably an important part of the answer.)

• "Will Moore's law continue to drive the elctronics industry?" What is Moore's Law? (From Frans Kaashoek: Moore's law is the observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^((n - 1962)); that is, the amount of information storable in one square inch of silicon has roughly doubled yearly every year since the technology was invented.

• "Never mind the fog; step on the accelerator and enjoy the uncertainty." Do you think you would enjoy working for this guy?

Lucky says that predicting the future is hard. What are heuristics that have been developed to predict it?

• Past as a distorted mirror of future:
  • weather
  • data access patterns
• (in same spirit) Fitting data to curve
  • processor speed doubles every couple of years
  • web doubles every 9 months or so.
• (bit more fancy) Scientific laws or theories:
• classical mechanics can predict future of balls falling, etc.