From Electrification To Cloud Computing: How Does
The book – The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr is basically a piece of history about the world’s technology developments from the Industrial Revolution a century ago to today’s Information Revolution. It reveals complicated interactions between technology advance and human society in a relatively plain way. By inserting numerous stimulating stories to the book, the author tried to explain some complex theories and intricate techniques in understandable words, which makes the reading an interesting experience. Hence it is an interdisciplinary book since it intends to explore the correlations between information technology and economy but not a professional book for computer scientists or economists because its readability. In fact, this is a book which ordinary readers could bring with them on their holidays and gain much inspiration from.
This book is a long story and it is not only the story about one of the greatest revolutions in the human history but also a story about the events and people behind the revolution. The first half of the book focuses on the developments of energy supplying and information technology as well as the production and distribution of electricity and computing as utility. The second half of the book discusses how these technical developments have changed users’ behavior and even the behavior of the entire society. More importantly, how their behavior is going tol change in the future. Following are the outlines of each part of the book.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human muscle power has no longer been sufficient for large scale manufacture of goods. Water-power and steam engine, though much more efficient in power supplying, bear the disadvantage of complicated and expensive. The advent of electric power not only accelerated the Industrial Revolution but also dramatically changed the world’s history. Inspired by the scene of manual drills, Thomas Edison created an entire system to supply large amount of electricity as a utility efficiently and safely to local homes, offices and shops. However, due to the lack of talent in business, the great inventor firmly believed that electricity as a kind of power could not be transmitted far, hence large companies should their own generating plants. It was Edison’s commercial genius employee, Samuel Insull, who implemented the idea of producing and supplying electricity as utility to the industry owing to the appearance of steam turbine, alternating current and demand meter.
The need for processing information in most companies at the start of twentieth century not only encouraged the widespread use of an early binary machine – punch card tabulator, but also impelled the birth of a brand new information technology industry. After that, the first generation of computer – mainframes have replaced punch-card tabulators because of their unprecedented speed and accuracy. However, some disadvantages of mainframes such as the difficulty of operation were exposed gradually to the users. It was the appearance of personal computers that brought the IT industry into a new era, the PC age, when both computer hardware and software developed in a rapid speed. Nevertheless, personal computers as single-purpose machines at that time resulted in a great waste simply because the processing power increased much faster than communication bandwidth. In recent years, thanks to the arrival of fiberoptic cable, computing utility can be transported in a long distance and all the computers are now connected to be one machine.
In 2005, the trend that software would be replaced gradually by utility service could be observed clearly. Google built its vast and sophisticated data center in The Dalles. The “world’s biggest data center” consisting of large numbers of clusters of custom servers which are connected by Google’s proprietary software can provide users with internet search services using parallel processing. Another company, Salesforce.com offered a utility service which is known as software as a service, where the clients are able to process their data on the company’s website with a relatively lower price rather than install the huge complicated software themselves. Amazon also announced its utility computing service –S3 and EC2, which allow users to run software on Amazon’s computer systems owing to the key technology of virtualization. Just as PC have replaced mainframes, utility computing will take the place of PC and become the future of computing.
The process of electrification had caused a huge impact to the world in the first half of last century, in fact it entirely reshaped the business and society. Electrification on one allowed factory owners to boost their output and gain more profit than before, on the other hand destroyed some traditional industries such as ice distribution. Electrification also made it possible to reduce a large number of manual labors in manufacturing industry while raised the wage of the worker, which prospered the American middle class. Public education gained its long-term development as well due to the demand for educational workers. The widespread use of electrical appliances made housework easier for housewife. Briefly speaking, electrification had changed every aspects of domestic life.
Having discussed how computing provider produce and deliver their service to the users, the focus of the book turns to users’ demands and behavior.
Despite of the similarities between electricity and computing utility mentioned previously, there are some apparent differences between them. What electricity utility produce and transport is electricity itself. Electrical applications’ implementations rely on physical appliances, which can only be placed locally instead of distributed remotely. In the contrary, computing applications as a kind of digital services can be shared by all users and transported over the network. Another feature of computing utility, modular makes the World Wide Web into a real World Wide Computer because computing applications can be spited into many parts and provided by distinct utilities all over the world. To the users, another important aspect of utility computing is programmability, which means users are able to write their personal programs with the services even at home.
Utility computing grid charges a very little fee for their strong processing, transmission bandwidth and storage capacity and no doubt that these features help small-scale companies such as YouTube, Skype, Craigslist and PlentyOfFish achieve their large business successes and wide popularity in a short time with few human labors involved. One remarkable behavior of these companies is that the more products they sell, the more profits they gain, which is known as “increasing returns to scale.” The key reason to this phenomenon is that the company simply provides tools and their website as a platform where users create and share most of the works in a pretty voluntary way. This trend, on one hand enables individuals to get access to all sorts of information as well as to express themselves easier, on the other hand leads to a relatively high unemployment rate due to the substitution of machinery for human labors. Moreover, income disparity would be enlarged because great wealth is congregating to the hands of these “digital elites”.
As the process of digitalization develops ceaselessly, most cultural goods exist in the form of digital, which have caused a huge threat to traditional paper medium. To satisfy the demands of easy availability for their readers, newspapers began to publish the news reports online and entirely changed the way they make money. Unlike traditional newspapers bundling all sorts of contents together in a single publication and profit from the advertisements inside, online newspaper would be split into individual stories and the profit from the click on the specific advertisement attached to the website. Just as people tend to live in homogeneous groups in real life, so people are more likely to communicate with the one who holds similar views online. Personalization technologies and filtering tools such as Google search engine and blogs even accelerate the formation of online communities where like-minded people’s views become more extreme.
The World Wide Web as a general purpose technology can distribute its services to the people all around the globe. Naturally, it is possible to be exploited by terrorists or criminals to launch attacks as the price of computing goes down and the communication bandwidth goes up. The Internet has become a battlefield and information warfare could happen in any places at any time. However, terrorist is not the only threat faced to the World Wide Web. Another potential weapon is botnet. This special type of virus distributes through the Internet by inserting themselves in email attachments and can be installed in the host when the attachment was downloaded. More serious consequences that botnets would cause are confidential information theft and denial of service attacks which would probably destroy the whole network. Electricity shortage, natural disasters and technological faults are also risks that could lead to Internet failures. As a portable system, the governance and structure of the World Wide Web should be concerned as well.
When Internet users are enjoying the convenience of information searching and online communications brought by the World Wide Web, their behavior are being monitored and their online records such as searching and shopping records are stored in companies and governments database. Furthermore, by inputting these data into data-mining algorithms governments and corporations can easily identify individuals with the corresponding online records. The processing of information did not catch up the steps of the processing of matter and energy until the advent of punch-card tabulators. And it was the appearances of personal computer and the World Wide Web that diluting the central control, in a very limited degree.
As is predicted, artificial intelligence will play a vitally important role in the next stage of Internet evolution, which advocates a combination of computer and human mind. It will not be a dream that there is a direct link between the Internet and human brain and whole world’s knowledge is connected to people’s minds. At that time, human beings will become parts of the World Wide Computer. This trend will become more evident along with the development of cloud computing as more types of information will be stored and analyzed in the cloud. A new Internet language using tags to describe distinct objects is being created by computer scientists, which will make the Internet a more power and sophisticated medium.
At the end of the book, the author, Nicholas Carr drew a conclusion that the future of the world lies in computing instead of electricity. This is the big switch as the book’s title implies.
The book consisting of eleven chapters each of which contains many short stimulating stories, though is generally well written and easy to read, has some particular views and arguments worth highlighting. A cautious reader might have found that the name of the book –The Big Switch has a triple meaning. The first big switch, as was mentioned previously in this review, is the switch from electricity to computing. The widespread use of electricity and electrical appliances brought the world the first leap. But the electrical age has long gone. The consequent era of information technology replaced its position and has played a leading role in the progress of human society for more than half a century. Other two switches described in detailed in the book, are the changes hidden in energy revolution and information revolution themselves. For the sake of increasingly large-scale productions of commodity, human beings have never ceased searching for new energy. From human labor to water-power, and from steam engine to electric generator, energy became more efficient as well as cheaper. Eventually, it was the electricity utility drove the Industrial Revolution to its destination. The processing of information was left far behind by the processing of energy until the advent of punch-card tabulators. However, by comparing the energy processing to the information processing, it is not difficult to see how similar these two switches are. From punch-card tabulators to mainframes, and from personal computers to the Internet, information processing has become faster and cheaper as well. Moreover, it will not be a dream that computing ability can be produced and delivered as a new type of utility in just the same way as electricity.
One impressive story comes from chapter two, the inventor and his clerk. The number of people who have never heard about the name of Tomas Edison must be few. There is no doubt that the man is one of the greatest inventors in history due to the thousands of patent of inventions including the system he created to produce and transmit electricity to homes and offices, which turned electricity into a kind of utility. The stories of the great inventor could be accessed from everywhere, or even from primary school textbooks. However, this book reveals another side of him. Blinded by his temporary success, Edison stubbornly believed that it was unrealistic to expand the service of electricity utility to distant plants since direct current was unable to transmit in a long distance. It took another man – Samuel Insull to fulfill this utility. Insull, who was actually an employee of Edison himself, could achieve what the great inventor could not achieve because he has an economic mind. This illuminating story gives us a thought of how significant the economic aspects of technologies are.
The book also shows wonderful interactions between technologies and other fields of society. On one hand, technology development help improve productivity and working conditions, boost middle class and prompt public education. On the other hand high-level education and economy feed back to technology. As Perez (2005) described “The future of Information and Communications technologies (ICT) is inextricably intertwined with the future of the global economy and of each regional and national economy.”
The most important topic and conclusion of the book is the generalization of utility computing in the future, or in another word, Cloud Computing. As Cliff et al. (2011) argued in their work, high performance computing will play a significant role in the coming decade. The term ‘Cloud Computing’ has become an increasingly popular word occupying headlines of all sorts of newspapers and scientific magazines, and even appears more frequently in people’s daily conversation. In fact, cloud is merely a metaphor of Internet resources in a pretty romantic way, which makes the term as mysterious as the real clouds hanging in the sky. However a simplified definition can be given like this (Sun, 2009), cloud computing is a computing model or a kind of computing services which provides dynamic scalable and virtualized IT resources that shared by users connected to the cloud server via the Internet. Nowadays, a majority of Internet users are indeed enjoying the convenience brought by cloud offerings such as Gmail, Dropbox and any other online storage applications without noticing. Surely the significance of cloud computing would not be exaggerated and it is an inevitable trend which should draw more attentions. An obvious benefit that brought by cloud computing is lower expenditure than before. A company which needs to do some complex data processing has no choice but buy all the hardware and equipments to build its own data centre in the past. Now with cloud computing the company is able to share the IT resources with other users on its own demand, in real time, at an affordable price. In other words, only pay for what you use, when you use it. Another advantage of utilizing cloud computing is that users have no need to learn anything about the complex data processing since every detail is concealed in the ‘cloud’. The most significant impact of cloud computing is the improvement of efficiency. By accessing the cloud server, single systems have attained a faster and more professional way to process massive data.
Another interesting phenomenon mentioned in the book is utopian thoughts about the imminent technologies. Visionaries had a beautiful dream that the arrival of electricity would eliminate the dark aspects of the society and turn the world into a paradise. While other utopians owned the fantasy that linking computers could create an unconstrained community regardless of any political boundaries. However, real world is rarely so perfect. Information technologies are now being used as powerful tools for monitoring and controlling individuals by bureaucrats. Companies, in another way, control their employees by expanding workplace and workdays as corporate information is able to be accessed from anywhere through the Internet. This may be a thoughtful question offered by the author: have we attained the real freedom from the rapid development of technologies?
The book compares the electricity which had set fire to the second Industrial Revolution parallelly to the cloud computing which is going to lead world to its next revolution with a broad vision. It examines the deep interactions between technologies and the society and exposes both positive and negative aspects from it. More importantly, the book draws a picture about future technology and life. Therefore, in every way The Big Switch is a thought-provoking book from which a professional gain inspiration and a normal reader gain knowledge and joy. The price of the book, seven pounds, makes it a high cost effective product. It is a book that I would recommend all the readers to own.