association-list

Read­ing this econ­o­mist analy­sis of the latest OECD report on broad­band pen­e­tra­tion got me won­der­ing some­thing. Not about broad­band pen­e­tra­tion per se, but about pro­duc­tiv­ity and its rela­tion to com­puter tech­nol­ogy. This bit specifically:

In other words, new appli­ca­tions that effec­tively har­ness broad­band must still be devel­oped. So far, only online media and enter­tain­ment have done this. Strik­ingly, this is not simply a case of people and busi­nesses inte­grat­ing broad­band into their cur­rent ways, as with the PC in Dr Solow’s time. Indus­tries like health care and edu­ca­tion need to change as fun­da­men­tally as, say, the music and film busi­nesses have.

The ques­tion that I asked myself is: ‘What else is there that you can only do with a broad­band con­nec­tion that is not media based?’. Media is the obvi­ous case and the big winner so far. Every­thing that has hit big on the inter­net so far because of the increase of band­width is a sub­case of media. Music, movies, MMOs[1] (espe­cially open-​​ended vir­tual worlds like Second Life), Skype/​VoIP, YouTube, etc. All of these high-​​bandwidth activ­i­ties are media stuff, bulk file trans­fers and high bit rate streams. So what else can we do with our ever faster (in some places, at least) net­work connections?

Brain­storm­ing on this has proved fairly hard. Dis­trib­uted Com­pu­ta­tion was the first thing I thought of. The faster and lower-​​latency your net­work con­nec­tion, the amount of smarts you need to put into chunk­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing parts of prob­lems decreases, as coor­di­na­tion becomes easier and deliv­ery of prob­lems and solu­tions becomes faster. While this is pretty cool, it doesn’t speak directly to the prob­lem of pro­duc­tiv­ity in work or life. Ser­vices like Amazon’s Mechan­i­cal Turk ben­e­fit par­tially from the same things, but since human pro­cess­ing speeds have a sharp upper limit, they can’t ben­e­fit indef­i­nitely from the increas­ing speed of net­work connections.

Think­ing about this sort of thing leads pretty quickly back to the basic nature of the work that people per­form and the lesiure activ­i­ties they engage in, and how com­put­ers and net­works can make that easier, faster and more efficient.

There are lots of people already work­ing on moving matter around more effec­tively and cheaply. It’s been the number one pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of human­ity since com­mu­ni­ties were more than a couple of days to walk across, and com­put­ers have already the bulk of their impact there, so most improve­ments are going to be incre­men­tal, and aren’t going to see much ben­e­fit from net­work speed, as matter is a lot slower than the bits that describe it.

There are also a good number of people involved in the sell­ing of that matter once it’s arrived (at least at an inter­me­di­ate dis­tri­b­u­tion center, for online retail­ers). There too, com­put­ers and net­works have already had most of their impact. Other than more and better prod­uct infor­ma­tion and bigger and higher qual­ity sam­ples, there is not much ben­e­fit from faster net­works here.

For people who design things, engi­neers, artists and design­ers, there’s some net­work scal­ing to be had from col­lab­o­ra­tion to be had in terms of col­lab­o­ra­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, this space is hard to break into, because it’s much easier for Autodesk to add net­worked col­lab­o­ra­tion to Auto­CAD than it is for some­one else to design and build a col­lab­o­ra­tive draft­ing and design appli­ca­tion from the ground up.

For cer­tain types of col­lab­o­ra­tive office work, there are also some scal­ing ben­e­fits to be had. Google is already doing some inter­est­ing work in this space, and I’m sure that there are at least a couple of for­tunes to be made in it (although at some level it feels crazy to go up against Google at this point, espe­cially when they already have such a lead). Nor am I con­vinced that there is a great deal more net­work scal­ing ben­e­fit to be had here. There is a low upper limit on the useful com­plex­ity of office soft­ware, and it’s already fairly pain­less to deliver these appli­ca­tions to the web browser.

What strikes me, at this point in my thought process about this issue is how little I know about how other people spend their time at work. To have any useful ideas about this, I think that I’m going to have to have a better grasp on how many people do what and what their jobs actu­ally entail. A better idea of how pro­duc­tiv­ity is mea­sured and what it actu­ally means would help, too.

I figure that I have to be miss­ing some­thing. Oth­er­wise there’s not a whole lot of rea­sons to keep increas­ing the amount of band­width that homes get much beyond the point of being able to stream 2 – 3 HD pro­grams and along with a couple of phone calls and some bulk trans­fers. That’s a big con­nec­tion, but not that far off. Of course, it’s quite pos­si­ble that these new, major uses for net­work­ing are things that no one is doing yet, and that no one sees the value of at this point, in which case, I’m unlikely to be the one who thinks of them first. Still, trying is an inter­est­ing exercise.

1) MMOs have expe­ri­enced another ben­e­fit: being able to smoothly handle more other play­ers in your imme­di­ate area at once. I con­sider this a sub­case of dis­trib­uted computation.