The Third Wave of Computing

Technology has the power of disappearing. Electricity and lights in houses are so normal that we don’t think of them as technologies. It is only when the power goes out that we remember the importance of them. Computers and the Internet are heading the same way, disappearing or becoming ubiquitous.

In the New Technology paper The third Wave of Computing, Günter Schulmeister applies a framework of theories, which helps to describe the past and forecast future of technologies, on ubiquitous computing. It gives a short overview of ubiquitous computing in the fist part and define the framework in the second part. The third and last part, uses the framework to describe the rise of ubiquitous computing. It will also mention cases of companies and products connected to ubicomp (ubiquitous computing), which shared common destiny with certain aspects of the framework.

When Fiction becomes reality

Do science fiction writers predict the future or do they invent it? Did Arthur C. Clark predict the satellite or did he just invent it? Or moon travel? Did Jules Verne predict submarines powered with electricity or did he invent the idea? Maybe invent is a strong word – perhaps influence.

If you look at the history of science and compare with science fictions and popular movies and show you see that there is a string relationship between the storytelling and actual technology created. Maybe science fiction writers have stronger influence on technology then we though, by just creating the a powerful and believable worlds that others will build.

These ideas are the topic of one of the research papers in my New Technology class this year. Paper is written by Sunnefa Pálsdóttir and is called When Ficiton becomes reality.