Peter Cochrane: Seamless connectivity - if only!
How hard can it be for systems to default to the optimum choice?
As a nascent 1980s road warrior, the frequency of my travels accelerated in 1993 along with the acquisition of an Apple PowerBook 180. Almost in concert, my luggage was augmented with a tool kit, RG11 leads, adapters - and alligator clips.
The latter were essential, as the embryonic internet had no Wi-Fi or local servers and getting online from anywhere on the planet was a major challenge at that time. Dismantling telephones, call boxes and hotel bedrooms to find a point of access was the norm. Telephone wall sockets were rare, and dialling into a UK server from Singapore might see bit rates spanning 1200 to 9600 bit/s. It could take an hour or so of trying due to the limitations of the modem echo cancellers and network connections of the day. But once connected, email and crude image and document transfers were adequate for the business at that time.
Fast-forward to today, and Wi-Fi is almost universal, with 4G and 5G in reserve. Getting online is now a cinch with bit rates generally spanning 20 to 500Mbit/s, and almost everything is possible from videoconferencing to gigabyte-sized file transfers.
Throughout my experience of mobile working from the early 1990s until today, I have nurtured a vision of seamless connectivity: open my laptop and be automatically online at the highest rate possible with the most reliable connection available; all my apps would live on their respective servers, requiring no intercession by me whatsoever. This is the way my future was going to be. If only!
That 1980s MacBook 180 with 33MHz Clocking, 4MB of RAM, and a 80MB HD is now a distant memory. My latest machine provides 3.2GHz Clocking, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. In less than 35 years this represents a gain of 100, 1,000 and 25,000 respectively, and it is way more powerful than the supercomputers of the 1990s. But I am still waiting for my ‘seamless dream' to be fulfilled!
From a hardware standpoint, my laptop is powerful enough to do all I want. It already supports more than one AI system, and I need no more than a few algorithms. For now, it is highly reliable, and I only ever close the lid. Very rarely do I shut down or reboot, and it always opens up ready to go - apart from being connected to the right network, or any network at all!
At home and in the office, it is seemingly baffled by the choice of eight Wi-Fi options. A new hotel or campus completely foxes it too. The one exception is when pairing with my mobile phone, which automatically hops onto a 4G or 5G service.
How difficult can it be to get to my vision? I only need a little more operational subtlety!
And whilst that is being fixed, an even simpler idiosyncratic design failure exists within my email client. Every day I email my business partner and a few colleagues. So when I type Lauren, Eric and Colin in the address line I expect it to select the most commonly exercised choices, but no! I always get a random section of rarely contacted Laurens, Erics and Colins. Frustrating, time-consuming and error-prone, or what!
At the end of a long, hard day away from home, it can be hard to remain sufficiently alert and sharp-eyed to spot connection and addressing errors. It should all be so easy to fix, but this class of failure continues - and it represents a significant security risk.
Peter Cochrane OBE is Professor of Sentient Systems at the University of Suffolk