High interest in high technology accrues when something appears to work like magic. This goes back to the day when someone ignited a flame with a spark and a fart. Notable instance of phony magical technology: The Turk, a pseudo-automaton of the 16th century that played humans in chess contests.
Alas, there was a human master concealed in the innards of The Tussaud-like Turk’s hulk. As much was suspected by Grand Master Kasparov, who lost to IBM’s Big Blue computer in 1997. We recall Paradyne putting a human in a computer to win a government contract within living memory when the machine wasn’t ready; so Kasparov’s paranoia may be providential. That’s not the story we’re telling here.
The high-tech industry, especially in the wake of the Internet boom burst, is less magic and more boring. Armies of charlatans have marched into the River City going back at least since the day of the transistor, ready to obfuscate their way to a small fortune, with the devil to pay. They did it to beat the band in the rush to bandwidth. But that’s not the story we are telling here either.
There are only a few people today that are, like the old time alchemists, still fancy free and ready for anything magical in technology. Chief in this group we count Colin Johnson. He has graced the pages of EETimes for many years, and through neural networks and fuzzy logic to micro machines and molecular computers, he has kept his eye on the cutting edge. These are not boring technologies, and they will take so long to develop that there are no SUVs or three-martini [excuse us, Calistoga water] lunches in immediate store, and the field is relatively clean of marketing hypsters.
You see, in the inverted pyramid of technology adoption, the money is up at the top, where a Larry Ellison sells a relational data bas, or a Edsel Ford IV equips a Mustang with a catalytic converter.
On the cutting edge it doesn’t always pan out. Technologies lose flat out. Or, as with plasma displays, you may give up the watch, and 10 years later discover that someone has finally fairly successfully commercialized the strange electrical conductors well enough to represent an electronic version of Latrell Sprewell glowering.
Wired casts a light – maybe a plastic psychedelic black light, unfortunately – on the weird and wonderful of this ilk. But the true technologist is Colin. The role of DNA in molecular circuit assembly, quantum encryption, DSP-based adaptive optics, wireless-sensor networks, massively distributed software simulations, radioactive isotopes that fuel microscopic battery .. its all there in Colin’s blogs and reports in EETimes.
A not-to-recent but still-quite-worthwhile example:DNA molecules form nanodevice scaffolding. This article discusses a molecular-circuit assembly technique that uses DNA lock-and-key means of chemical bonding in conjugal with more conventional silicon chip technology. The work was done at the
