Date of publication: February 28, 1999
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According to technology forecaster Paul Saffo, we are poised on the brink of the next technological leap. Only, this leap goes backwards -- to the analog realm.
Analog, for those whose foreheads are creased with bewilderment, is a word describing technology that is essentially like the real world. An analog clock is a machine of gears, hands, and a face -- compared to a digital clock, which is just a little computer. A snapshot is analog; a GIF is digital.
Saffo, who gave a talk I attended this month, says the 80s were the decade of processors, in which Moore's Law kicked in, and cheap computing became the order of the day. The 90s have been a decade of lasers, in which CD-ROM and fiber optic telephony have redefined the uses for microprocessors.
But the 2000s will be the decade of sensors, as computers acquire the ability to know more about their environments than what we type into them.
Sometimes a minor event foretokens a sea change. The first was the destruction of a bottle of vodka sent from a Soviet officer to a Pentagon counterpart. Security officials thought it was a bomb. This event, taken at the end of the Cold War, told Saffo we needed to think differently about who our enemies were.
Second, thieves in Los Angeles were stealing car airbags in great numbers. Why? Because the old accelerometers, the complicated sensors detecting crashes, were expensive to replace. So a black market formed.
A MEM, or MicroElectroMechanical Sensor, replaced the expensive accelerometer in car airbags. (MEMS) are merely semiconductors with a bug -- they extend beyond the chip's normal gateways to the environment beyond.
Like a car that leaves the usual racetrack, the electrons on MEMS find themselves in a brave new world -- our world.
They can sense anything from temperature to fluid controls to pressure changes.
VLSI Video. Miniaturization today allows a videocam with all the attendant circuitry required to attach it to a computer to cost manufacturers approximately $9 a unit. And this price will drop. Cheap video translates into cheap "eyes" that can be used for a myriad of applications -- surveillance, security, and even party games.
Yesterday's expensive video camera has been shrunk to a lens with a glued-on chip.
MIR Stands for Micropowered Impulse Radar, and that's what it is, a radar tower on a chip. Temperature sensitive, you can put an MIR in an engine block, and it will tell you when to change the oil. It can detect metal. You can put it in a wall and cover it with plaster, and it will still work.
Future burglar systems and motion sensors -- simpler than today's infrared and microwave sensors -- will rely on MIR.
It can be used to avoid collisions, and to find studs in walls.
Piezo-materials are materials, usually ceramics, that give off an electrical charge when deformed. Conversely, they deform in the presence of an electrical field. Put a charge in, the material deforms; deform the material, it sends out a charge.
Piezos are particularly useful as surface-mount sensors for measuring physical movement and stress in materials. But more importantly, piezos are useful not just for sensing, but for effecting -- for manipulating our analog world.
Piezo materials are Saffo's favorite, because they not only sense, but they then take action on what they sense -- they effect.
With Piezo materials, you could build a bridge that becomes stronger on the approach of a heavier vehicle. Skis that adjust to hill conditions to reduce shimmy. Airplane wings with painted-on Piezo bits that adapt to optimize weight and strength, and smooth out turbulence.
McDonalds' french fryers, using Piezo materials to sense heat and viscosity, can make the same exact french fry in every fryer worldwide.
Sensors foretoken a new world in which computers no longer remain in their enclosed cyber realm, but venture out into our analog, "real" world.
The Furbie fad of last holiday season saw the first full-fledged toy of the sensor age. The CIA banned them from desktops for fear of them overhearing and repeating classified info.
In the Gulf War a poison gas detector filled an entire Humvee, limiting its usefulness. Now it's down to briefcase size. By the next war, we may have it down to pocket size, capable of measuring toxicity a dozen times per hour.
What sign will there be that the old world is giving way to the new? It will be when your 15 year old son, the person you have looked to to understand computers, will give up in frustration, and your 5 year old daughter will come to his rescue -- because she sees the new world as being made of Furbies -- friendly electronic companions.
The craziest part of this new world is that, instead of being totally digital, it will be part analog, like good old fashioned snapshots, Rolex watches, and us.
It will be the ultimate decentralization -- or to put it more positively, of hyperdistribution. We will know everything we want to know about anything anywhere.
That's a new world. Analog will be hip -- and everything will be intelligent.
So you better be, too.
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Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback
Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
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