How do you wrap an elephant for Christmas?
Photo credit: Nam Anh via Unsplash
I find that the hardest bits of writing projects are the beginning and the end (although the middle can sometimes be pretty tough going too). At the start, it is hard to take the step of converting an idea into reality: the blank page is forbidding, but so is the act of making a mark. And at the end, it is hard to take the step of completing a draft, and facing all those moments when you thought, ‘This isn’t good enough: I’ll sort it out in the next draft.’
One way to get through beginnings and endings (and other steps that I need momentum and energy for) is to tell people what I’m planning to do. They may not care, but, once I’ve said something out loud, I feel rather more obliged to actually do it.
That’s what I’m going to do this week and next week: share some thoughts on one writing project which is nearly finished, and one which is about to begin. Fortunately, in both cases I have a co-author who helps shape and write the content, and who helps keep me honest.
My co-author on the book which is nearly finished is Anubhav Pradhan, and the working title of the book is The Transcendental Elephant. It’s about computing, and is driven by a set of beliefs about the role and understanding of computing in the modern world:
People who work in enterprise technology (like both of the authors), have been steadily creating a world which is more and more dependent on the systems we build.
For people who don’t work in enterprise technology, it is harder and harder to understand how the systems they are dependent on actually work.
This gap, between dependence and understanding, is exacerbated by recent developments, particularly the growth in the use of AI.
The world would be a better place if the people who built technology took the trouble to explain it to those who use it.
It’s a story which can be engaging and entertaining if told well: we hope that we can tell it well.
To emphasise the gap in understanding which drives the book: our hypothesis is that, unless someone has had professional exposure (for example, working in an IT department), academic exposure (for example, undertaking a computer science degree) or exposure through personal enthusiasm (for example, building your own software project) to the fundamentals of computing, it is almost impossible to build anything resembling an accurate mental model of how enterprise technology works.
It’s hard to get an accurate count of the people who meet those criteria, but we estimate it as between twenty and fifty million people. That’s a lot of people, but it’s a small fraction of the approximately eight billion people alive today. That means that we are asking 99.4% of the global population to live in a world which depends on systems built by the other 0.6%. We don’t think that’s okay.
What has the elephant got to do with all of this? First, technology is the elephant in the room, and it’s an elephant that keeps getting bigger. This might seem like an odd phrase to use: normally the elephant in the room is the thing that we don’t talk about, and, in the age of AI, it can feel as if we never shut up about technology. However, AI is only a tiny fraction of the technology that we depend on, and we rarely talk about all of the other things that make up our digital world (talk about physical infrastructure such as data centres only counts if we get beyond the ‘Data centres good! Data centres bad!’ slogans).
That tendency to focus on a narrow aspect of technology illustrates the other way in which the elephant appears. In the ancient parable which appeared in Jain, HIndu and Buddhist texts from the 5th century BCE, five blind people feel different parts of an elephant and report that it is like a basket (the ear), an iron rod (the tusk), a plough (the trunk) and so on. Technology is much the same. Without explanation, it is reasonable to think that it is like the part we touch: an app, or a chatbot, or a form, or a phone, or a tablet. It is hard to see the whole elephant, but we try to fit it all into the book.
Given this parable, it seems natural to use the metaphor of the elephant to describe the fundamental components of technology. Thus the book considers the elephant’s brain (the circuits and switches we use to do computing), its ears (the software we use to get computers to do what we want them to do), its memory (the data we store and process), its trunk (the networks we use to connect people and machines), its tusks (cyber defences and the threats they must defend from) and, finally, and suitably for a story which starts with an Indian parable, its halo (the dazzling aura of AI, whose brightness may be real and may be illusory).
The experience of writing the book has been a revelation. I thought that I knew enough about computing to simply tell the story. However, doing the necessary research has revealed elements of computing history which were new to me, including the anatomy of a vacuum tube, a vision of the Internet from the late 19th century, the ironic demise of the first telecommunications satellite, the tricks and techniques of the phone phreaks, and the existence of a GitHub repository which contains the code from the Apollo Moon missions: https://github.com/chrislgarry/apollo-11.
We’re currently completing the draft of the section on cyber security, and are about to begin the section on AI. Given pace to date, that means that we could complete the draft of the whole book before Christmas. That would require focus, and the push to the end (at least, the proximate end: writing and editing will take some more time). Hence declaring publicly here that the end is in sight, to give that extra push.
We’re not quite sure how we’ll launch the book yet: it would be great to find a publisher, but we are ready for a pile of rejection letters. The publishing world may not feel the same urgency or need to explain that we do. If we don’t find a publisher, we’ll find a way to get it out there anyway.
That’s the project that’s coming to a conclusion. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a project to start: more of that next week.
