27    Looking Back

Congratulations! You’ve completed your tour. You’ve seen some aspects of how a single process works. You’ve seen some of the ways in which multiple processes interact. You’ve seen some of the ways that failures affect processes and ways that systems can be organized to overcome those failures. Finally, you’ve seen some aspects of how processes attack or defend.

Let’s consider what difference that tour has made to your life. Have you had a life-changing experience? Have you learned skills that make you highly employable? Probably not, although no one will complain if you have. I’ll certainly be delighted—let me know of your experience!

Instead, what I think is more likely is that you have a different perspective. You’ve now seen some things you hadn’t seen before and learned of connections between ideas that are new to you. Of course, you could have learned about new ideas and connections from many different books on many different topics—so why would this set of ideas be of particular value?

In considering that question, I ran across this idea from William Gibson. He is responding to the question of whether we’ll have computers embedded in our brains:

I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn’t. Or, to put it another way, they will not know “computers” as any distinct category of object or function. This, I think, is the logical outcome of genuinely ubiquitous computing: the wired world. [….]

In this world there will be no need for the physical augmentation of the human brain, as the most significant, and quite unthinkably powerful, augmentation will have already taken place postgeographically, via distributed processing.

You won’t need smart goo in your brain, because your fridge and your toothbrush will be very smart indeed, enormously smart, and they will be there for you, constantly and always.

I don’t know if I necessarily agree with Gibson about the inevitability of this future, but I am hesitant to second-guess him. I encountered his novel Neuromancer when I was an undergraduate studying computer science in the early 1980s. At the time I first read his book, my everyday reality was a primitive slog with punched cards and batch computing. Gibson wrote about cyberspace and virtual reality, envisioning a world that is recognizable thirty years later, but that is still futuristic and incompletely realized.

I don’t know the future feature set of your smart toothbrush, but I do know something about how its computational mechanisms will likely work. Products come and go, technical concerns go in and out of fashion, but the underlying realities of computation are unchanging. They are properties of the universe, not attributes of the current technology. Understanding those properties of the universe gives us skills to deal with the computational systems in our lives; but more important, it also gives us insights into the broader world of ideas about communication, process, failure, and coordination—all of which affect us in some way every day of our lives.