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Bit Bang Rays to the Future Bit Bang Rays to the Future Editors Yrjö Neuvo & Sami Ylönen Bit Bang Rays to the Future ISBN (pbk) 978-952-248-078-1 Layout: Mari Soini Printed by: Helsinki University Print, 2009 Table of Contents FOREWORD 1 BIT BANG 7 1.1 The Digital Evolution – From Impossible to Spectacular 8 1.2 Life Unwired – The Future of Telecommunications and Networks 42 1.3 Printed Electronics – Now and Future 63 1.4 Cut the Last Cord by Nanolution 103 2 RAYS TO THE FUTURE 141 2.1 Future of Media – Free or Fantastic? 142 2.2 Future of Living 174 2.3 Wide Wide World – Globalized Regions, Industries and Cities 205 2.4 Augmenting Man 236 APPENDICES 265 1 Course Participants 266 2 Guest Lecturers 268 3 Course Books 268 4 Schedule of the California Study Tour in February 2009 269 5 Study Tour Summary Reports 272 Foreword Bit Bang – Rays to the Future is a post-graduate cross-disciplinary course on the broad long-term impacts of information and communications technologies on life- styles, society and businesses. It includes 22 students selected from three units making the upcoming Aalto University: Helsinki University of Technology (TKK), Helsinki School of Economics (HSE) and University of Art and Design Helsinki (UIAH). Bit Bang is a part of the MIDE (Multidisciplinary Institute of Digitalisation and Energy) research program, which the Helsinki University of Technology has started as part of its 100 years celebration of university level education and research. Professor Yrjö Neuvo, MIDE program leader, Nokia’s former Chief Technology Officer, is the force behind this course. During the 2008–2009 semester the students in Bit Bang produced roadmaps describing the development and impacts of digitalisation. During the fall semester the course focused on four interesting technology trends until 2025: processors and memories, telecommunication and networks, printable electronics, and carbon na- nostructures. The course started with introductory lectures on the fundamentals of comput- ing and communication by professor David Messerschmitt from UC Berkeley. The textbook for the fall semester (Wireless Foresight – Scenarios of the Mobile World in 2015) provided the systematic tools for scenario building. The Bit Bang course had a number of guest lecturers presenting a variety of topics, from the development of Nokia’s first smart phone the Communicator to a discussion on the meaning of 4 robots in the future as a part of everyday life. The fall semester gave the students a broad background and tools to foster a better understanding of the speed and impact of technological development. The spring semester focused on the impacts of technology trends on a broader scale, in the society and in people’s lifestyles as well as in business. The spring topics were globalisation, the future of living, the future of media and intelligent machines. In addition to the lectures, textbooks and group works, the Bit Bang group made a study tour to the UCB and Stanford Universities and a number of high-technology companies in Silicon Valley. Passing the Bit Bang course required active attendance to the lectures and seminars as well as writing this joint publication based on the fall and spring group works. The texts have been written by doctoral students and are presenting their views. We do not take responsibility about the contents. The book is published in co-operation with Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. We want to give our special thanks to Annika Artimo for her devotion and hands on support from the beginning to the very end of this ambitious project. We warmly wish you all to have nice and eye opening moments with this book! Yrjö Neuvo Sami Ylönen 5 1 Bit Bang 1.1 The Digital Evolution – From Impossible to Spectacular Juha Ainoa1, Ville Hinkka1, Anniina Huttunen1, Lorenz Lechner1, Sebastian Siikavirta1, He Zhang1, tutor Anu Sivunen1 1 Helsinki University of Technology (first.last@tkk.fi) 1 The Information Technology Revolution Over the past 60 years information technology has become an integral part of our world. Computers have changed from being a rarity to a commodity. Our daily life is so influenced by information technology that it has become almost impossible to imagine a world without it. The speed with which this transition has taken place is hard to comprehend. But still the development is accelerating. And it is quite likely that the changes that lie ahead are going to be much bigger than anything seen so far. In order to understand the magnitude of the transition we are witnessing it is helpful to look back – way back. 1.1 A Brief History of Information Technology In the beginning the earth was empty and void. But around 4 billion years ago there was a sudden decrease of entropy and life emerged. From a combination of proteins and nucleic acids self-replicating biological systems evolved. These organisms diversi- fied and grew in numbers. They developed sensors to probe their environment and nervous systems to make sense of these inputs. Organisms grew more complex and so did their brains. Information could not only be found in their bodies but was also increasingly present in their behavior. Animals living in groups learn from observa- tion or by communicating with each other. Over the millennia of years species were created and species went extinct but, the amount of information on earth slowly 8 grew. Then something remarkable happened around 40,000 years ago: man devel- oped language, a much more sophisticated version of communication. Language is essentially an information compression technique that allows sharing large amounts of knowledge between individuals and makes it possible for the shared information to survive its host. Nevertheless information was still bound to biological systems. About 5,000 years ago the invention of writing changed the rules of the game dramatically. The abstraction of language into writing, with its digital nature and information compression capability, made it possible to store large amounts of in- formation outside the human brain.1 This made information something that is not bound to a certain person, geographic location, or specific time. Nevertheless, the process was in the beginning cumbersome, expensive, and error prone. Clay tablets with cuneiform writing were easily dropped and broken, moving an obelisk needed hundreds of slaves, papyrus libraries burned down, and short sighted monks did not copy manuscripts reliably. Only when Gutenberg invented the printing press in the year 1439, did things begin to speed up. The amount of stored knowledge started to increase dramatically. Mass reproduction made it cheaper to spread knowledge and created redundancy against information loss. Still reading had to be done by people. At the same time, machines were aiding human labor in various other parts of life. Water and steam replaced animal and human muscle power. It only took a while until people found out how to use mechanical device, to create clocks and simple calculators. Over the years these concepts were refined. Mechanically readable storage systems were constructed. They could save numbers or be used to play music. With the development of electricity and electronics new concepts were tried. Meanwhile there was also great progress on the theory side. At the beginning of the 20th cen- tury it could be shown that certain types of machines are universal problem solvers. In 1943 Konrad Zuse2 built the first of these computers. Although it was not too obvious in these first simple machines, suddenly information was completely free of the biological bottleneck. This ability to use machines to create, process, store, and transmit information much faster and more reliably than humans marks the begin- ning of the digital revolution; the Bit Bang. 1.2 The Digital Revolution Since the 1940s this digital revolution has brought a plethora of changes. Individuals, lives have been transformed, industries and economies created and destroyed, and societies have been struggling to keep pace. But the item that changed the most was the computer itself. Their technology core developed from early relays, to vacuum 1 Arguably rock paintings or monuments had already been used to convey information for a much longer time. However, they were not a very efficient means of preserving larger amounts of information. 2 Jürgen Alex, Hermann Flessner, Wilhelm Mons, Horst Zuse: Konrad Zuse: Der Vater des Computers. Parzeller, Fulda 2000, ISBN 3-7900-0317-4 9 Bit Bang tubes, to transistors, to integrated circuits. They were shrunk from building filling machines to gadgets that fit in a pocket. Meanwhile their power increased thousands of times. Processing that was once only available to governments, operated by highly trained specialists, can now be found in children’s toys. Computers have become abundant - a commodity. How could all this happen so quickly? Why did this digital revolution change our society so fast in only 60 years? The simple answer is exponential growth. Moore’s law describes the core property of this development. It states the trend that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on a chip doubles roughly every two years.3 So far exponential growth like this has been a characteristic only of biologi- cal systems. Even though there has also been exponential growth in technology in the past it has always been either a short-term effect or was linked to the population growth. In contrast, the growth we are witnessing in information technology has outpaced any other development. The earlier detour into information history points out two reasons why the develop- ment since the 1950s has been so fast. The obvious reason is the removal of the bio- logical bottleneck. Computers can process most kinds of information almost infinitely faster than humans. They are much more precise and less likely to forget.
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