Those two concepts are completely diametrically opposed
Article by Jams Crown
Sometimes I think we have too many computer engineers and too many computer scientists. Further, it seems we have too many academics which wish to redesign our society and civilization completely. They claim that they are smarter than everyone else, and they understand the mathematics of complexity and chaos. They explain to us that they can help us systematize the world so it will run more efficiently, and at optimum.
However, when I talk with these individuals it’s obvious they don’t exactly know what they’re talking about, nor do they even agree with each other. Much of their dialogue is based in hypocrisy, and that’s problematic for me. You see, I am a free-market thinker, and I understand that millions of consumers and businesses choosing what they want and who they wish to conduct business with is much better than the government controlling the entire game in their attempt to make it more efficient.
In many regards this entire argument goes back to the debate between communism, capitalism, and socialism. It has to do with freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it has to do with what Milton Friedman called; the right to choose. Not long ago, I was discussing this with someone who said that they would rather have a bottom up society, than a top-down society. Why I ask; why not some of both where it makes sense.
If you will read Ludwig van Misses book “Bureaucracy,” you see that we do need to pool our resources and various levels of government to do the business of the people, and yet, that individual was very much a libertarian thinker and economic philosopher. Nevertheless, he explains his arguments quite well. It’s not that I am against the technocrats, or don’t wish to engage their philosophical arguments, it’s just that I see the hypocrisy of many of those who wish to reengineer all we are and all we’ve built into some type of new utopia, especially as they recommend things which go against their very words of wisdom they promote.
Okay so, I’d like to give you an example here. On one hand the academic environmentalists and their alternative energy theory would have us believe that we need a more “distributive energy” system in the United States of America. Then these same folks, along with the most brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists also tell us that we need to take all the computing in our society and move into the cloud. They tell us that this will be better, more efficient, and save energy. Really?
Those two concepts are completely diametrically opposed. First of all, it’s quite expensive, and not cost effective for every person to go and install small wind turbines, and solar panels in their homes. However, they argue that to build new power plants, that a lot of energy is lost in the transmission lines, and it costs quite a bit of money to build new transmission lines and upgrade our current system and infrastructure, and yet, if we don’t we’ll be sorry later.
Next, on the cloud computing front we see that big computer companies are busy building giant data centers everywhere, and they want to move all of this big data, along with all your personal data on your computer into these cloud data centers because it is more efficient they tell us, but is that information really safe in the cloud? You see, when the power plant goes down there are big blackouts, and therefore you go powerless. What happens if the cloud goes down?
Now then, if your solar panels at home go out, or your system is haywire, only you, one individual is severely affected by this, and at that point you are very happy to be hooked into the grid. Just as if your computer goes down and you lose all the data on your PC, laptop, or tablet, it would be nice to have a cloud computing backup system. But I would submit to you that either of these two theories to make things more efficient cannot stand alone. Therefore, redundancy is needed. Nevertheless, the technocrats will remind us that if something is engineered perfectly, it will never go out anyway, therefore you really only need one solution if the system is solid.
That’s fine, but as a hobbyist engineer, and having built things which are simple, and also complex, I can tell you that Murphy’s Law is just as real, and just as good as any theory that these brilliant scientific academic minds can come up with. What I’m saying to you is that their arguments are flawed, and hypocritical. Yes, both strategies in any complex system are worth discussing, but I’m not sure I trust the cloud, and I don’t trust the theory of distributive energy either.
Having one power plant power up large areas makes a lot of sense, and it works. The distributive energy folks need to admit that until their alternative energy systems can work at the optimum they promise and is shown to be the most efficient to the conservation of energy, uptime, and cost. Once it can be used at individual residences and businesses to power up all of their needs without disruption, then doesn’t make sense to go there yet. And once that is possible, we don’t need the grid, but right now we have the grid and it works. What works is always of value – which is an axiom hard to debate.
Now then let’s talk about personal tech devices, and the batteries which are inside of them. Most of the batteries are insufficient due to the cost of Ion-lithium batteries, and that really isn’t very good technology anyway, we must do better there.
Therefore, if more information is in the cloud, those batteries will not demand so much energy for the processing power of the individual device, therefore they will be more efficient. So you see, there are both good and bad in both of these theories, and it is nice to have backups, safety, and redundancy.
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