The green fields of impending doom.

John von Neumann on Technological Prospects and Global Limits. 1955. (can be easily found on the internet)

I have promised a summary of some IT-related articles from the past long gone. I want to set up the scenery wide and start with one which predates the IT business as we see it. 

In 1955, Steve Jobs, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Bill Gates were born. Dennis Ritchie, the "father of C" is still a teenager and won't join Bell Labs for another twelve years (1967). Speaking of Bell Labs, the transistor is only seven years old, and its inventors will share the Nobel Prize in Physics next year. The business landscape of information technology, as we perceive it - does not exist yet. Everyone gets a clean sheet of paper to work on. From scratch. Is that so?

In the same year, John von Neumann, a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and genius, wrote an article for Fortune magazine titled "Can we survive technology?". Let the title sink for a moment.

It goes over how humanity must start measuring its actions on the global scale, harness cheap energy from nuclear reactors, balance political power in the middle of the cold war, understand climate control, and fight global warming(!). All of these areas can vastly improve human life or destroy it. He then briefly envision a new way of automation, possible by using large-scale computation "machines, containing (...) possibly more than 100,000 cores, (...) operate faultlessly over long periods, performing many millions of regulated, preplanned actions per second, with an expectation of only a few errors per day or week[...]" (edited quote from the article.)

He is not sure if the human civilization will make it, or burn itself to ashes in the process. The danger was clear and present.

Why do I think this is relevant? Because even in the garden of IT eden, there were big challenges all over the place. Every time we have to deal with some complex solution, we like to think about "starting from scratch". The "scratch" is a line that was scratched in the ground to mark as the beginning point of the game. The scratch of all scratches, the zeroth iteration of the future 100,000 cores is already doomed. So better move forward without wishful thinking about the days long gone.

As for the question, apparently we can survirve technology. Today, it is more the question if we can survive without it. Or if the technology requires us to move on.

We will move on, every day is a new begining, scratched in the code commits. (And we like to port DOOM everywhere we possibly can, so the future has never looked so bright.)