Simplicable's Fundamental Principles of Technology

by a blog called Simplicable. The name of the author on all the articles I was looking at was John Spacey, so it appears to be John Spacey at the helm of this blog, which I think is based out of Singapore. So these are concepts that apply to or drive technology and technological change and innovation. And it goes beyond things like circuits or electricity or mechanical systems or anything like that. These are more like ideas and observations that underlie technology,

again as identified by Simplicable. So I don't wish to suggest that these are universal fundamental principles, just rather that I came across this list Unsimplicable and I thought it was interesting, so I thought I would talk about some of them today. So first up, we've got a concept that ties in with Moore's law to an extent. You could argue that Moore's law is another fundamental principle. In fact,

it's one of the ones that's listed by simplicable. I think that's going a little far to call it a fundamental principle. It's certainly an observation that people have attempted

to push beyond some pretty hard boundaries. But as a refresher, just so that you understand what I'm talking about here, Moore's law stems from an observation that Gordon Moore paid back in the middle of the last century, actually, when he saw that economic and technological factors were contribute meeting to a system where there was an economic demand for progressively more powerful microprocessors and later on computer chips, and that this demand in turn created an incentive for fabrication

companies to come up with ways to meet that demand. Like, it wasn't just magical that the fabrication companies were able to make more powerful processors. They saw the demand there and then they said, okay, well, how can we make something that meets that demand. It's not just magically happening on its own. So every so often we would see companies find new ways to fit more discrete components onto a square inch of silicon wafer. As they were able

to a couple of years previously. So generally speaking, the law of Moore's law boiled down to every eighteen to twenty four months, fabrication companies would find a way to double the number of transistors that they could it onto a silicon wafer an inch of silicon wafer square inch. Now, over time, this concept morphed into a similar but different one.

We still call it Moore's law, but now we don't necessarily say that the processors of today have twice as many transistors on it as the processors from two years ago. For example, now we say every two years or so the chips that fabrication companies are producing are twice as

powerful as the ones from two years earlier. So, in other words, if you bought a high end processor in twenty ten, and then you bought another high end processor in twenty twelve, the twenty twelve one should be twice as powerful as the twenty ten one, And then in twenty fourteen, if you bought one, that chip should be twice as powerful as the one that you had bought back in twenty twelve. Now we also tend to get a little loosey goosey with a whole concept of what

power means in this context. Often this comes down to processing speed, how fast can the chip process information, how fast can it complete executions of operations, But powerful can also include some other concepts like bitwidth, and you can think of bitwidth as how large of a chunk of data can this processor handle. So if the bitwidth is greater,

the processor can handle larger chunks of data. To me, one interesting thing about Moore's law is how we choose to interpret it so that it will remain relevant over the years. Because pretty much everyone has acknowledged we're running up against some obstacles that are just impossible to get around based on the technology we have developed so far.

Let me explain that a little bit more so. As you reduce the size of these components so that you can fit more of them onto a silicon wafer, you start getting down to a size where you're encountering issues with quantum mechanics, and these quantum mechanics issues are not in alignment with the way that we want our electronics to work. Essentially, we get to a point where the pathways we have created for electrons are so small that the electrons have the potential to exist in a different

part of the pathway than where we want them to be. So, if you think of transistor gates as actually being physical gates, as in, you know, you're when it's closed, you're not allowed to go through once you get to a certain size, there's a potential for an electron to be on the other side of the gate without having to actually physically pass through the gate. It just means that there's the possibility that the electron could be on the other side.

And as long as there's a possibility, it means that sometimes that's what happens. And if you can't control where the electrons are, then the gates mean nothing, and it means that you're going to get computational errors. So there are fundamental physical limitations to how small we can make things if they're working the way that we have designed microprocessors for you know, the better part of a century. So that means that we have to come up with other means, other ways to try and eke out more

performance in these chips. If we want Moore's law to remain relevant, and that's only if we say, all right, we want Moore's law to remain relevant, but not the original Moore's law. We're talking about our reinterpretation of that observation that was made, you know, in the middle of the nineteen hundreds. So that is kind of where we are with Moore's law. It's still sort of relevant, but mostly because we're willing to bend on how we interpret

it and how we define it. So no one wants to reach a point where they have to admit that the rate of improvement is slowing down. No one wants to get to that point. So we'll just keep on moving things around, like doing the balls and cups routine, until we can no longer fool ourselves into thinking that

we're able to keep this rate of change up. And this is what brings us up to a different fundamental principle, as defined by Sipplicable called accelerated change or accelerating change, I should say, and that's just what it sounds like, because we all realize that over time, stuff changes. Accelerating change means that the rate of change itself is changing. It's not just that things are changing day to day.

It's the concept that they're changing more quickly than the rate of change was before, and that this is driven by technology and how we use that technology. So with this kind of concept, we would be able to look at any ten year span. So let's say we looked at nineteen fourteen to nineteen twenty three, and then let's say we compared that with a more recent ten year span,

so let's say twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three. Then we ask the question in which of those ten year spans, In which of those decades would we see more change? And if we want to get specific, where did we see more technologically driven or oriented change. Since the nineteen fourteen to nineteen twenty three decade predates the invention of the transistor, it's pretty easy for us to say, well, the most recent decade has seen way more innovation driven

by technology. It's not even comparable. And that's true, but we should also remember once again, these advancements in technology, they're not happening in a vacuum. It's not like technology, if left to itself, will evolve and improve over time. Stuff in the world shapes our approach to technology, and then our technology shapes the stuff in the world and our interaction with it. So in nineteen fourteen, you would say, well,

what kind of factors were influencing technological development. In nineteen fourteen, well, there was a big one. It was the Great War, which was later called World War One. They didn't call it that at the beginning because there were still optimists back then. They weren't expecting there to be a second one. In fact, they called it the War to End all wars.

It turns out that was wrong. Anyway, this war spurred a ton of innovation as various countries tried to find more efficient ways to kill the enemy while sustaining fewer losses of their own, or at the very least just killing war of them than they managed to kill of us. So we got lots of stuff like machine guns, motorized military vehicles, airplanes were used in warfare. Chemical warfare became

a thing. We also got some other stuff that wasn't expressly made to kill people, like gas masks which was meant to save people, and field radios. Anyway, my point is that the concept of accelerating change isn't something that we can just isolate from the rest of the world. It's also something that can lead people to make predictions that I think may at best be a long shot. It's what has fueled a ton of discussion around concepts

like the singularity. This is this idea that we reach a point where change is happening so quickly and it's so constant that there is no way that you can meaningfully talk about the way things are, because by the time you're done making a sentence, they ain't that way no more. They've changed already. So this idea, which relates to other concepts like humans becoming something more than human, the so called transhuman approach. Transhuman in this case meaning

something beyond humanity. It doesn't have anything to do with something like the transgender community. That it's a different thing, very important thing, but different. This concept of transhumanism is about no longer being strictly human the way we would define it today, and that could include lots of things. It usually includes some form of augmented intelligence. Either we figured out a way to boost our own biological intelligence, or we've incorporated technology into us in some way that

that then boosts our intelligence. Sometimes we also have an idea of digital immortality thrown in there. Mostly it feels a lot like stuff that's in the realm of science fiction rather than stuff that's in reality. But I would argue that it's based on this perception that change is happening faster with every passing year. And if that's your basic argument, well, then it stands to reason that at some point the rate of change will be such that

there will be no meaningful way to quantify it. But like Moore's law, I would say this belief is based off things that may not be universally or permanently true.

I think one of the mistakes that some futurists make is that they equate all change with what we see in things like Moore's law, because Moore's law describes exponential rates of improvement right with at least with processor complexity, which then we redefined as processor power or performance, So that same rate of change would then apply to everything with the way some futurists frame stuff out. But that's just not true. We don't see exponential change in everything

that's related to technology. Some things actually change at an even faster rate, they might start to approach a hyperbolic rate of change, But some things experience much slower change. They don't advance that quickly, like battery technology does not

advance nearly as quickly as microprocessor technology. So it appears to me that the singularity is going to require a lot more than just super fast processors, unless we decide to redefine what the singularity is, and then we could say we're already in it because we've redefined it, which we kind of have done with Moore's law. I guess we could do that, but it's not very satisfying. So accelerating change is one of those fundamental ideas in tech that may or may not apply depending on the tech

type we're talking about. I would say that for some technologies, like autonomous vehicles, for example, we have not seen accelerating change. Instead, we saw an initial burst of innovation, incredible innovation, and for a few years that continued and it did look

like it was accelerating change. But now we're seeing engineers having to hone in on specific limitations and problems and challenges within autonomous vehicle technology, and these require careful solutions, and some problems might be accounted for, but lots more have been discovered or are not accounted for, and we aren't seeing accelerating change in that field anymore. Iterative changes, which is still good, like we're still seeing advancements, but

it's not going at this you know, breakneck speed. That accelerating change suggests. Okay, we've got a lot more principles to cover. I think it's time for us to take a quick break. All right, we're gonna move on to a different fundamental principle that Simplicable has identified as being, you know, fundamental to technology. And so let's talk about complexity. You can think of complexity falling into one of two categories.

Simplicable calls it essential complexity and then accidental complexity, or what I would refer to as non essential complexity. Now, if something has essential complexity, that doesn't necessarily mean there's no way to simplify the technology. It might be possible to simplify it, but it's essential complexity. That means that if we were to try and simplify this technology, to streamline it or remove features or anything like that, then in the process, we would also reduce the usability or

value of that technology. So, in other words, we could make it less complex, but we would also make it less good, or less desirable or less useful. This can fall into subjective perceptions. It's not just an objective truth. So for example, let's say you've got a team and they're developing a smartphone, and their initial lineup of features are all the typical ones you would find in a smartphone. It'll be able to make calls, they'll be able to

send and receive emails and text messages. It'll be able to take photos, all that kind of stuff. The complexity necessitates certain design decisions, right, Like, in order to achieve the things you have listen did as what the smartphone has to do, you've got to make certain design decisions to support it. This all is just logical, right, And that could range from everything from the size of the battery you're gonna need if you want to have a useful phone life so it lasts at least a day.

It may involve things like screen resolution. You want to make sure that people can see whatever it is that's being displayed. There, process or power to support all these different functions, Like, all these things become necessary considerations in order to provide a good experience. But let's say there's someone on your team who just doesn't see the value in having a camera and a smartphone. Maybe this person never uses the camera on their smartphone at all. Maybe

they just don't take pictures. They don't see it as being fundamentally important to a smartphone's design. They could argue that you could drastically simplify the design of the smartphone if you just ditched the camera right. That means you get rid of the lenses, you get rid of all the sensors, you get rid of all the stuff that otherwise would have to be in the smartphone for the

camera to work. And then you could either make the smartphone smaller, you know, create a smaller form factor because it no longer has to house those components, or dedicate that space for something else. Or even this could precipitate into changes for things like the battery life and the processor because it no longer would need to support the functions of a camera like these are sort of a cascading list of decisions that this could affect. However, someone

else might say, well, this smartphone has no camera. It's not a good smartphone. I would argue it's not even a smartphone at all because there's no camera in it, And to them, the reduction in complexity has resulted in a reduction of usability or value. Again, there's no objective truth here. It's all dependent upon how you feel about it.

But there is a general understanding that technologies can only be simplified and made more efficient and less clunky up to a point, and once you get beyond that point, you start to lose whatever it was that makes the technology useful in the first place. Now, if we go to accidental or non essential complexity, we've got the opposite.

This describes a technology's tendency to have functions or features or elements to it that make it more complex but add no extra value to the technology itself, which means if you get rid of it, not only do you not eliminate something valuable, you might actually increase the value of the technology because you've gotten rid of some clutter. Now this could be software, it could be hardware. Like

it doesn't have to be a physical technology. It could be something like a bug in software that when you eliminate it, not only does it make it less complex, but now the software works more effectively. So you've increased the value of the software. Even if you were to just argue that eliminating the bug reduces the size, like the data size of the software itself, you have increased its value, right because size is it's not an infinite resource that we have like your machines that run software

have a limitation on how much they can handle. And if you start to reduce the demands of software by eliminating bugs, that increases that software's value, maybe not monetarily, but certainly from a process standpoint. So, with essential complexity, reducing complexity reduces the text value. With accidental complexity, reducing complexity increases the technology's value. Now there's a related tech issue I would like to kind of dip my toe

in and mention here. That's called feature creep. Now, this is when a team is building out a technology and then they begin to add in features that were not included in the original plan for the tech. You know, oh, what if we were to add neon lights, or what about we put speakers on the outside of the car. Feature creep happens a lot in tech space. It can

again happen in hardware and in software. It can also get to a point where it will doom a project or the very least delay it for ages and potentially mean that you end up with something that is less valuable because of all that feature creep, which ties into another fundamental principle that simplicable identifies where they say worse

is better. By that, they mean not that if a technology is worse, it's better than a better technology, But sometimes a technology that has fewer functions but works really well is going to be viewed as more valuable than a device that has way more functions but it's harder

to use, Which makes sense, right. If you make something that is easy to use and it does what it's supposed to do, then people are going to gravitate toward that more than they will technologies that it might have a lot more bells and whistles, but they don't do anything particularly well that doesn't typically stand the test of time well. Feature creep plays into both of these things here,

both the complexity issue and the worst is better issue. Now, to me, the definitive example of feature creep, the one I would use if I were doing my TED talk on what feature creep is and why it's bad, would be the game Duke Nukem Forever. It was an infamous game while it was in development, and once it published it no longer became infamous. It just kind of became a bit of a punching bag, or sometimes just completely dismissed. So if you're not familiar with the Duke nucom franchise.

It follows this overly macho male hero who's based a lot on characters that Arnold Schwarzenegger has played or Bruce Campbell. In fact, it lifts a lot of lines straight from the Evil Dead movies. Use Campbell Evil Dead movies when they were really campy and stuff. And it's a first person shooter game that a company called three D Realms

originally announced in nineteen ninety seven. They'll keep in mind when studios announce a game, it typically means that they've already been working on it for a while, so they announced it in nineteen ninety seven, but the game wouldn't actually come out until two thousand and eleven. Now, video games can take a long time in development, but fourteen years is atypical, although Star Citizen might catch up in a couple of years if they don't have a full

game released before then. And one of the many problems that was causing a lot of these delays was feature creep. See. While the team at three D Realms was working on the game, other companies were releasing updated game engines that supported more features, so you could build on the game engine you were depending upon already and continue building out your game. But the fear was that when Duke Nucom would release, it would look dated against games that were

created on the more recent game engines. So you get the head of the project who suddenly demands that the team swaps to a different game engine, a more recent one, and that necessitates starting from scratch for most aspects of the game, like almost all the assets needed to be redone in order to work with this new game engine, and it sets the entire development process back to the beginning.

Then you would have times where the leader of the project would want capabilities that were starting to show up in other games to then be incorporated into Duke nukeomb forever, when that had not been a consideration earlier in development. So as a result, the game was constantly going through development, then revisions, and sometimes complete restarts, and by the end of it all, I think it was pretty safe to argue that the game was filled with non essential complexity.

And of course, by the time it finally published under a different company. At that point, because it had changed hands, it was no longer really a relevant game to the sensibilities of most gamers. You know, the even if the gameplay had been stellar and free of things like bugs and other issues. The tone of the game no longer fit what people wanted anymore because more than ten years had gone by since the game had been announced, and people's tastes in gameplay and game tone had changed in

that time. So feature creep really was a huge problem for that game. Well, here's another concept that Simplicable includes as a fundamental principle of technology, the creativity of constraints. This one really speaks to me. Basically, this idea says it is much easier to be creative and innovative when you're working within some form of constraint, because constraints drive decisions, and if you are without constraint, you have no limiting factors that make it necessary to decide to go one

way versus another. Any decision you make appears to be as valid and viable as any other decision you could make, because there's nothing pushing back against you. And that can mean you just end up spinning your wheels a lot and you don't really make any progress. Constraints can be pretty much anything. Budget is probably the big one, right. Usually you're working within some sort of budget, and that means at least in theory, you can't make decisions that

would require more money than the budget allows. Obviously, lots of projects go over budget, but the budget is meant to serve as that constraint. A deadline is another constraint you might face. You know, you have to finish your task by some appointed time. But there can be lots of other types of constraints, even in tech. Some of them could be technological constraints, like it's just physically not possible for you to go beyond a certain level of

performance because of the limitations of technology. There can be material constraints. Maybe you know you can't go further in any particular direction because the materials that you can use have their own physical limitations, and if you were to try and push beyond that, you would break the device or whatever it might be. You can have social constraints, maybe there are things that are not socially acceptable that you back away from with decisions as you're making. You know,

this technology. There could be legal constraints. Maybe there are regulations or laws that mean that you can't do certain things, and that means you have to come up with creative solutions to get your technology to work. Properly while still being within that legal framework. So with constraints, you end up saying, I need to do X, that's my goal. But meanwhile, AB and C are all in my way, So how can I achieve my goal? And you start problem solving, and the problem solving shapes not just how

you get around those challenges. That problem solving actually shapes the end product itself. The thing you make in part is a reflection of the constraints that you encountered while you were making it. But if you don't have constraints, then you don't have those guidelines, right, You don't have anything to push against, no hard edges that you're gonna bump up against and have to work around, and honestly,

that can stifle creativity. That particular concept really rings out to me because I've encountered it myself when I've played certain types of video games, right Like, there are big, open world video games that are exploration based and there's very little direction, and that can feel too vast. I feel like I'm not really doing anything. And then there

are smaller, more modest games. They might be much more directed or have very defined goals that you need to achieve, and those really resonate with me because I feel like I'm making progress as I play it. Now, this is not to say the big open world games with very little direction are bad. They're not bad, and the people who love them are not bad people. They're not wrong for loving them. It's just something that fundamentally doesn't work

with the way my brain works. And so for me, those constraints really are important because they provide structure, and with that structure, I can then feel if I'm doing well or not well. Without structure, I don't know that, and then I start tumbling into an existential crisis. And y'all, you've heard enough episodes of this show. You know nobody wants that. Okay, we're going to come back in just a moment and talk about one other principle that simplicable identifies.

Keeping in mind they have others than the ones I've just mentioned, and we'll finish off this episode from there. But first, let's take another quick break to think our sponsors. Now, as I mentioned at the top of this episode, I was just kind of surfing around the web, which dates

me right, using terminology like that. That's fine. I'm an old man, I get it, and I found this simplicable blog which I had never seen before, and I started reading this article about the different fundamental principles of technology, and this one also really stood out to me because I think it's one that we can easily contextualize right now based upon things that are playing out at this very moment. And that is the principle of cultural lag.

And again this is these are things that surround technology and technological development. Right We're not talking about the actual things that make the technology work. So what is cultural lack? Well, it's pretty much what it sounds like. It's essentially when technology outpaces society in some way. Technology or the things that the technology introduces, like the possibilities the technology creates

are ones that society lacks the facility to handle. So I would argue, right now, we're really seeing this with generative AI and then artificial intelligence in general, because keep in mind, generative AI is one application of artificial intelligence. Generative AI is a type of AI, but not all AI is generative AI. Right, all cats are mammals, but not all mammals are cats. So generative AI has some potential applications that society is just not prepared to handle.

Everything from copyright infringement, to plagiarism, to the capacity to generate and disseminate misinformation. All of these are issue with generative AI that we just don't have the ability to handle, or even being able to differentiate between something that was created by generative AI versus something that was created by a person. We're not really able to handle that either.

And again, artificial intelligence in general also falls into the category of a technology that we have you know, cultural

lag associated with it. So often I talk about this within the context of legislation as various politicians and leaders around the world struggle with the challenges created by technological innovation and how can they take advantage of that innovation, how can they try not to stifle innovation, but at the same time, how can they protect the people and institutions of a country from harm based upon what this

technological innovation can do. And we're even still seeing it here in the United States with regard to like base principles of what the Internet in general and the Web in particular allow, right, I mean, that's why we get arguments about stuff like Section two thirty here in the United States. There's a cultural lag that is significant because keep in mind section two thirty. Section two thirty is what protects online platforms from being held liable for the

content that users post to those platforms. Right, Like, if you were solely responsible for the content that goes up on a website, all the content that goes up on the website comes from you, and you start posting stuff that's illegal, well, logic dictates you should be able to be held accountable for posting illegal material. You posted it, you created it, you posted it, you're the one responsible.

But if instead you create a website that allows anyone to post there, and some other person you've never heard of, you don't know them, you've never met them, they come to your website and they post something illegal, section two thirty would protect you from being held accountable for the thing that this other person did. You provided the space, but you didn't create the content. And section two thirty

itself has got some limitations. You're supposed to at least put forth reasonable effort to remove illegal material, or else you can lose the protection of section two thirty anyway. All of this was worked out as part of the Communications Decency Act of nineteen ninety six, the year before three D Realms announced the development of Duke Nukem forever. So it was nineteen ninety six when Section two thirty was first written into law, and we're still struggling with

it today. You still have people on either side of the political ideologies who want to either eliminate Section two thirty or to amend it significantly for very different ideological reasons. But you know, there's this agreement that on both sides that it's not what they want, and that shows a cultural lag that's really significant. I mean, we tried to acknowledge it back in ninety six, and more than a decade later, more than a decade and a half later,

we're still trying to grapple with it. That's a significant cultural lag. Now, there are several other topics that Simplicable lists as foundational principles of technology. I'm not sure that I agree with that classification in every case. I think they are things that relate to technology and are to varying degrees important. I don't know if I would call

them fundamental principles. However, I think all of the ideas are well worth discussing, and I will likely do another episode on this in the future because I find it really interesting. To think about these concepts and observations and

how do they interact with our approach to technology. And there are tons more that they list, so we'll we'll get to those in another episode if you'd like to read up on them, by the way, and just to see what Simplicable lists as fundamental principles of technology, as well as all the other stuff that's unsipplicable. The url is just simplicable dot com. That's s I M P L I C A B L E dot com. Now full disclosure, I do not have any connection to that site.

I didn't know it existed before today. I don't know anyone who writes for it. I just stumbled across it by chance and thought that the pages about, you know, these foundational principles of technology were really interesting and there's tons more on the site as well, so if you're so inclined, you should check it out. I'm very thankful that I came across them because it gave me a

lot to think about. And as I said, I don't agree with all the conclusions made by Simplicable, but I think it ends up being kind of find details that are arguably subjective. So it could just be because my point of view is slightly different, but it ultimately may mean that we're both arguing the same thing, we're just doing it in slightly different terms. So again, no slight, unsimplicable.

I think the goal is really an ideal one. They want to produce informative, straightforward and objective information to help educate people, which I think is a great thing to do. Certainly I strive to do some of those things, but not all of them, at least not all the time. All Right, Well, that's it for this episode. Like I said, I'll do another one coming up. Also, I've got a lot of travel coming up in the near future where

I'll be recording remotely. Got a really exciting opportunity to record an interview in a studio that's in Las Vegas, which I will be doing pretty soon, so be on the lookout or listen out for those. We've got some more episodes of Smart Talks with IBM that are going to publish in the near future in this feed, and also an episode of The Restless Ones, the show that I host where I talk with various chief officers usually CIOs or CTOs of companies to kind of get insight

into their leadership. Process and their approach to technology. We'll have one of those episodes published in this feed in the not too distant future as well, says you can hear my other work besides the stuff that I do here for tech Stuff, I'm still the same Dufiss no matter what where you put me, So no fear there, but I wanted to give you the heads up on that.

And yeah, this month turned into at least the back half of this month has turned into something that's far busier than I had originally anticipated when the month started, so I wanted to just kind of give a shout out and make you all aware of what was going on. All right, that's it. I'm getting out of here. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you

again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.