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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