The computing programming technology that lingers inside most data centers now

The computing programming technology that lingers inside most data centers now and that makes sense of the ceaselessly arriving bits - Here is information on a billion people. How many are named Bob? - is known as MapReduce. The name combines two well-know computer fuctions, Map and Reduce, and it is just the sort of program Janelle and Hillis would have dreamed up, had they ever met. MapReduce divides computation work among thousands of machines, just the sort of massive parallelism Hilli had in mind. What it implicitly does, however, is crunch what might have taken years into microseconds. If the charmed phrase of James’ stately Victorian elites more than a century ago was “Summer Afternoon,” ours might be “MapReduce”, a kind of magic two word code for a whole way of living and thinking. The most successful political and economic systems of the past, the ones that marked the winning “convergence” club of humanity’s last great leap, let people liberate themselves into a life of their dreams. Liberty meant tearing down old barriers to influence and security and knowledge; tipping over the Bastille, escaping colonialism. And it meant, too, providing a scaffolding of education, of social support, of laws and stability for citizens. The industrial, urban and rich countries that populate our world now evolved that way because their citizens made them so. They escaped the tyranny of the pre-modern, of a world where the small town you were born in and the pattern of your parents’ life were a kind of prision for your hopes. This was the whole trick of the Enlightenment, after all: What do you want to be? You decide! What do you want your nation to be? Decide that too. Dare to know! Look ahead now. The very best future political and economic arrangements will need to do something more than simply liberate us. They will have to enable and permit citizens to compress time. Just as the idea of a democracy was shocking once, this concept of a system tuned not merely for liberty but for compression of time should rattle us a bit. Certainly the attempt to achieve such an aim, to build the scaffolds and rails a time compressed world demands, will jostle much of what existst now. But to be modern means, in essence, the right, the ability to engage in compression. Nations or corporations or ideologies that can deliver this liberty of velocity - and that can construct and manage the flat-out fast, networked, artificially topologies such a life demands - will grow, thrive, accelerate even faster. The others, slowed by history or blocked by social or ideological designs, will miss the turn. They will be the new divergence club. Fast networks will elude them. Self-defense will be impossible; their time will be as vulnerable to easy manipulation and attack as the resources of China and Africa and Latin America were in the face of greedy colonialist plunder several hundred years ago. There is no equality of justice between the weak and the strong, the Italian historian Giambattista Vico once noted. So in our age. Between the fast and the slow? No 206 Vico, New Science 141 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018373