TSSJS 2009: Keynote with Neil Ford
Expectations are high as Thought Works’ Neil Ford takes to the stage. The title of his keynote: Predicting the Future
Neil wants to advise us how to avoid becoming IT-dinosaurs… and I have to confess I’ve chuckled at the occasional COBOL-developer joke on more than one occasion. So I’m all ears!
Yes, we’re bad at predicting future outcomes. Neil cites the classic Monty Hall problem, which shows human ineptitude when it comes to evaluating conditional probabilities.
Talking about paradigm shifts, he cites the iPhone, and notes that the big hit applications have generally exploited not just the device itself, but have combined numerous features of the iPhone platform.
He notes that Moore’s law can no longer by relied upon to give us a doubling in app performance over an 18 month period, and that WE – the developers – will need to achieve greater parallelism in our software if we are to profit from multicore processors.
Functional languages have an important contribution to make here (names Haskell, Scale, Clojure, F# as examples) as they to not suffer from (or are less susceptible to) synchronization and locking issues, which is what makes thread-programming in languages such as Java so difficult to get right. IN particular, Ford names Clojure as a potentially exciting intersection between dynamic and function languages in the sense that it gets the best of both worlds.
We are then reminded that warfare is frequently a source of (destructive) innovation; and are then advised to heed the warnings of Dick Feynman (physics genius, communicator and contributor to the Manhattan project) and George Orwell (author of 1984 and prophet of pervasive government surveillance).
[So where are we going with all this Neil? It'll be killer robots next!]
Well… there you go.
Now here’s an interesting prediction from Ford: Apple to become the world’s biggest bank. It’s true: The iPhone has increasingly shown it’s ability to generate huge turnovers via micro-payments.
The final quote in this quote-heavy keynote comes from from management guru Peter Drucker: „Best way to create the future is to create it.“
Summary: Neil’s got the gift of the gab and he’s a role model for effective presentation style (bullet-point suckers take note). However, on this occasion his chosen collection of weighty quotes and iconic images did not quite add up to a the kind of coherent narrative on “Predicting the Future” I would have liked. As for how to avoid my own dinosaurification: I’m gonna build me a killer robot!!!
Bruno Schäffer said,
October 29, 2009 @ 9:24 am
Adding to the quote from Peter Drucker, there is a similar quote by Alan Kay (father of Smalltalk and one of the main contributors to the Mac): “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”