Who saw
that coming?
Techno Talk
Max the Magnificent
Cast your mind back to the year 2000. How many of the devices and technologies that surround
us today did you see coming? Did you predict the advent of smartphones? Did you envisage tablet
computers? Did you forecast the widespread deployment of AI?
W
e live in an age of wonders.
Many of us don’t appreciate
just how lucky we are. For
most of human existence, apart from
the top 0.1%, people lived in abject
squalor. They were cold, hungry, dirty,
infested… and those were the lucky
ones. Now our homes boast hot and
cold running water, electric lights and
heating (and cooling where I live). We
issue spoken commands to artificial
intelligences, our humongous highresolution colour televisions show us
what’s happening around the world in
real-time, and… I could go on and on.
Knowledge is power
There are two quotes that often spring
into (what I laughingly refer to as)
my mind. The first is the expression,
ipsa scientia potestas est (‘knowledge itself is power’), which occurs in
Francis Bacon’s Meditationes Sacrae
(1597). And then there’s, ‘The simplest
schoolboy is now familiar with facts
for which Archimedes would have
sacrificed his life,’ which comes from
Ernest Renan’s Souvenirs D’enfance et
de Jeunesse (1887).
I love to learn new things. I’m incredibly fortunate in that I get to chat
with all sorts of people who know
things with which to boggle my mind.
Just the other day, for example, I was
chatting with Dr Gerard Van Belle, who
is Director of Science at the Lowell
Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. He
was telling me about all the telescopes
and other technologies we now have
at our disposal to vastly increase the
sum of human knowledge about all
sorts of things.
For example, we know that there’s a
star system that’s located about 3,000
light years from Earth. Our name for
this system is T Coronae Borealis, or
T CrB. This system is to be found in
that portion of the night sky we call
the constellation Coronae Borealis. We
know this is a binary system comprising a huge red giant and a white dwarf
orbiting each other. We know the white
dwarf is composed of electron-degenerate matter, which means that, while
having the same mass as our sun (give
8
or take), this mass occupies a volume
comparable to the Earth (give or take).
We know the white dwarf is sucking hydrogen away from the red giant,
resulting in it having a ‘sea’ of hydrogen a few meters deep. At some stage,
the hydrogen will undergo a runaway
thermonuclear reaction that will blow
off the surface layer of the white dwarf.
Known as a nova (as opposed to a supernova), we can predict (with a high
degree of confidence) that this event
occurred around 3,000 years ago, with
the light reaching us sometime between
the time of this writing and the end of
September 2024, resulting in a magnitude +2 star that will be visible to the
naked eye for a couple of weeks.
I don’t know about you, but the
fact we know any of this stuff blows
my mind.
I can see you!
A few years ago, I started work on a
hobby project I called my Countdown
Timer. Its role in life was to count down
the years, months, days, hours, minutes,
and seconds to the commencement of my
100th birthday celebrations, which will
kick off at 11:45 a.m. British Summer
Time (BST) on 29 May 2057 (mark your
calendar and stockpile the fireworks).
I put this on the back burner for a
while (so many things to do, so little
time to do them). Actually, I put it on
a shelf in the closet. Unfortunately,
the shelf collapsed, crushing all the
display elements. ‘Oh dear,’ I said (or
words to that effect).
I’m recreating this little beauty using vacuum fluorescent display (VFD)
tubes – try to visualise a steampunk
incarnation of 7-segment displays
implemented using a mix of vacuum
tube and cathode ray tube (CRT) technologies. The problem is that it’s about
33 years (290,000 hours) to the great
event, but VFDs have a life expectancy of only 10 years (87,000 hours).
I’m going to feel rather silly if I don’t
know when it’s time to start blowing
my own (party) trumpet.
Fortunately, as I mentioned at the start
of this column, we live in an age of wonders. For example, a company called
Alif Semiconductor (www.alifsemi.com)
recently announced a family of small,
affordable, low-power microcontrollers
(MCUs) capable of performing artificial
intelligence (AI) tasks like voice processing and image recognition.
They also have something they call a
Vision AppKit, which is a small circuit
board the size of a large postage stamp
carrying one of their processors and a
camera. They are sending one of these
bodacious beauties to me. It will be preprogrammed to recognise human faces
looking toward the camera. I’m going to
mount this on my Countdown Timer.
When someone is looking toward the
timer, the VFDs will shine in all their
glory. If no one is looking, the timer will
carry on counting but the displays will
be powered down. Brilliant!
Who knew?
How good do you think you are with
respect to predicting the future? We
can base this on how good you were
in the past. As we celebrated the year
Y2K and the start of the current millennium, for example, did you predict the
advent of smart phones that could take
pictures and videos, act as MP3 players, and provide GPS functionality? Did
you envisage tablet computers like the
iPad? Did you forecast the widespread
deployment of AI and the commercial
availability of virtual reality (VR) and
mixed-reality (MR) headsets?
Let’s get a little closer to home –
say a year ago. Were you expecting a
little AI-enabled MCU like the one I
described earlier to be available now?
Me neither. So, who was good at predicting the future?
Well, I recently read A Story of the
Days to Come by HG Wells. Published in
1899, this tale is set in a dystopian future
London of the 22nd century. People live
in enclosed cities and travel around on
moving walkways. Mega-corporations
rule the world. The rich live in skyscrapers while the lower classes are relegated
to subterranean dwellings. There are
intelligent loudspeakers suspiciously
the Amazon Alexa… Hmmm, maybe
Wells’ Time Machine was functional
rather than fictional!
Practical Electronics | July | 2024
