www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 17
Today's society, business, and government
Now that we have a general idea of how business and government got started, we are ready to have a look at how these have recently grown and to see how they are being done today. First, a description of how a computer works and what can be done with it is given so that we can better understand today's large-scale business and government.
We have seen how modern democracy is the result of our suspicion of power and our ideas of liberty gained during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. We will see how the sharing and balancing of power are put into daily practice by looking at how Washington, D.C. works today. Political scientists have been comparing about two hundred governments from around today’s world. We will see some of the reasons they find for a nation to choose a democratic form of government, and have a short discussion of the changes in our government that should be coming in the next decades.
We then have a look at today's way of life for two boys who live in the projects of Chicago so that we'll have a more accurate notion of what it means to live in poverty in the U.S. We then describe how we can begin a science of government by paying attention to the numerous social, cultural, and economic indicators being measured today.
The computer and its uses
The computer is changing the procedures of our civilization by enabling us to handle more complex questions and more lengthy tasks. It is an indispensable tool of science, government, and business. The internet is connecting the entire world together. To better understand today’s world–and tomorrow’s–the computer and its uses will be described. To reduce the mystery of the computer, we’ll first have a look at its operation.
An electronic computer is a machine that has numbered electronic circuits and numbered memory cells. Each memory cell holds a number. As the computer runs, it places numerical values into various memory cells. Each numbered circuit is designed to perform a specific, small task. For example, one circuit will copy the contents of a memory cell and another circuit will increase the numerical value of a memory cell's contents by adding the number one to its previous contents. As the computer runs, all circuits are turned off except for one selected circuit. Every circuit is designed to perform its task within a set amount of time and this makes the computer run in little time steps. Just one of the circuits is turned on during each of the computer's time steps. A computer program is a series of numbers telling the computer the order in which the numbered circuits should be turned on during each of a sequence of time steps. For example, a program might tell the computer to turn on circuit number 55 during the first time step and then circuit number 88 during the second time step. This two-step program would contain the number 55 and then the number 88. Each program makes the computer do a different overall chore by selecting a different sequence of numbered circuits in the same way that an artist creates different end-results by doing many small tasks in different orders.
If a computer has 100 million memory cells then they are numbered from one to 100 million (or from zero to 100 million minus one). Each memory cell holds a number. For example, memory cell number 1,012 might hold a person's age, the amount of a purchase, or the temperature at the center of a material. Cells hold numbers only. To hold a letter in a memory cell one has instead to hold a number. There are computer industry standards that assign numbers to each letter of the alphabet. Punctuation marks are also assigned a number. For example, the ASCII standard assigns numbers 65 through 90 for the uppercase letters A through Z, and 97 through 122 for the lowercase letters a through z. The number 90 is stored in a memory cell to indicate the letter 'Z.' In addition, the program contains a note that this memory cell is holding letter. A string of memory cells is needed to hold each letter of a person's name.
The computer has ten or so special, central memory cells connected directly to those numbered circuits and so can be operated on by each of them–the other memory cells cannot. These cells are special because, for example, their contents can be added together. The contents of memory cells 895 and 5,675,385 must first be copied to two of these special cells before they can be added together. The result might then be moved to memory cell 4,687.
Each circuit does a small task. For example, circuit 867 might increment the contents of special cell four by one, and circuit 9,475 might look in special cell six to find a memory cell number and then copy that memory cell's contents to special cell seven, and circuit seventy adds the contents of special cells three and four and places the result into special cell five. The speed of a computer indicates the length of a time step and is quoted in hertz. A one-gigahertz computer turns on one of its circuits 1,000 million times per second. (This means that in one second, that computer will look 1,000 million times to see if you've pressed another key on the keyboard.)
A particular computer program might consist of the following sequence of steps: select memory cells 95 and 107 as places to hold the number of computers bought this year and last year. Place the values 4 and 2 into those cells, add the two values together, and place the result into memory cell 212. It is difficult to keep track of circuit numbers and memory cell numbers so special computer programs, called assemblers and compilers, are used to help do this. Programmers tell the compiler that they will refer to a memory cell as "ComputersBoughtThisYear." The compiler selects a memory cell number, perhaps 95, and handles the programmer's chore of translating between the memory cell's name and its number. A programmer can then refer to a memory cell by a name rather than its number. The programmer also indicates whether a named memory cell is to hold a number, or an ASCII number that refers to a letter. In the same way, programmers avoid having to keep track of circuit numbers by referring to them by standard words, like "plus, minus, increment, times and divide" that the compiler is designed to recognize. The compiler translates these words into circuit numbers. The programmer can then tell the compiler to take care of the circuit and memory numbers needed to perform the instructions for processes like "ComputersBoughtInLastTwoYears = ComputersBoughtThisYear plus ComputersBoughtLastYear."
The instructions for a particular program might be stored in memory cells 2012 through 3156. One of the special cells is first loaded with the number 2012 so that it holds the next instruction's memory cell number, and this cell-number is incremented by one after each time step. The next instruction number is loaded from a memory cell into a special cell and then that circuit number is turned on during the next time step.
The computer's memory cells contain a number of individual electrical sections. Each section contains either "no voltage" or "some voltage." These voltage levels represent the numbers 0 and 1. (A machine can be designed to represent the two numbers 0 and 1 with "some or none" of anything, for example "some magnetism" or "some light.") The computer uses just the numbers 0 and 1 because it is much more difficult to represent the ten different numbers 0 through 9 by controlling ten different voltage levels. This is the reason computers implement the binary number system.
A decimal digit is one of the numbers between 0 and 9. We write large numbers as a string of decimal digits. Each digit within the string represents increasing powers of ten. The number 58,312 is shorthand for 5 x 10,000 + 8 x 1,000 + 3 x 100 + 1 x 10 + 2. A binary digit is one of the two numbers 0 and 1. In this system the numbers 0 through 3 are represented as 00, 01, 10, and 11. That is, each digit of the string represent increasing powers of two. The number 111 is shorthand for 1 x 4 + 1 x 2 + 1.
The memory cells of an early computer were designed to hold four sections. Each section holds a single binary digit. The phrase "binary digit" is abbreviated "bit." (There is an old joke about abbreviating "decimal digit" as "dit.") The largest number you can represent in a 4-section, or 4-bit, memory cell is 2x2x2x2 = 16. A 4-bit computer has just 16 circuits and can address memory in groups of 16 memory cells. An 8 bit computer has 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 = 256 circuits. Increasing from 8 to 16 bits increases the number of available circuits from 256 to 65,536 and dramatically increases the performance of the machine. Personal computers are now 64-bit machines.
An 8-bit memory cell holds a number that has a value between 0 and 255. The 8-bit ASCII standard, mentioned above, assigns a number to each of a set of 256 characters (because 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 = 256). Some of the characters are English, German, Spanish, and Greek letters, and the others are hearts, clubs, box pieces, and punctuation symbols. This is the reason we sometimes see gobbledygook on a computer screen.
A handful of memory cells are "wired" to the outside world. These cells allow the computer to exchange bits with attached external devices. A memory number is assigned to each of the keyboard, monitor, clock timer, math-coprocessor, serial and parallel ports (for modems and printers and such), disk drives and all other devices. Twenty years ago, the earliest personal computers were designed to handle just sixteen devices. For example, a programmer instructs the monitor to display the letter 'A' by sending ASCII character 97 to the monitor's memory address. The monitor is designed to light a certain pattern of dots when it is asked to display ASCII character 97. These dots look to us like the letter 'A.'
A complete computer program can be built up out of a handful of commands. There are commands to determine which key has been pressed on a keyboard, to place a character on the screen at a specified location (say, eight character positions to the right and four character positions down from the top), and to read or write a character from a file on a disk drive, and there are commands to do mathematical functions. For example, a programmer might display the letters 'Please enter your name' on the computer screen, then read the person's response from the keyboard, and next write that response into a disk file.
If a chore can be described as a sequence of steps then a computer can be programed to do that chore. The computer is well suited to do our most repetitive tasks–for example, the daily business chores of buying, selling, paying, and billing. A government or business, which has millions of records, can use a few computers to do the paperwork that would require the efforts of thousands of persons.
A unique program has to be made for each different chore in each different type of business and for each occupation and every manufacturing procedure. We humans have already spent fifty years programming computers to do for us each of the repetitive tasks of each our occupations. It will take a few more decades to complete this job. In the 1950s, the earliest computers and their software cost millions of dollars. This meant they could be afforded only by governments, armies, and big businesses such as auto manufacturers. Soon hospitals and banks could afford them. As the price dropped to $100,000, car dealers and such began to use them. Through the decades they became affordable for increasingly smaller businesses. As the price became a few thousand dollars then any business that wanted them began to have them. Today, every corner store and every home can afford computer systems. A $1,000 computer today has enough capacity to store the 40-character name of all six thousand-million of us humans on a 240-gigabyte disk.
One of the lengthiest hand-figured mathematical procedures was done by an astronomer and involved about 5,000 steps. Before we humans landed a vehicle on the moon (see www.gutenberg.org/etext/116 for a video), we needed to know how the size of the Moon's surface rocks compared with the size of the vehicle. If the rocks were too large, it would be difficult to land there. A clue about rock size is obtained by measuring the time it takes rocks to cool off and heat up as sunshine is suddenly removed and then returned, as happens during an eclipse. The heating and cooling time involves the ratio of volume to surface area because the rock's volume holds heat while its surface area disperses heat. Infrared telescopes were used to make the heat measurements. The rocks at the landing sites were determined to be the size of dust particles. This 5,000-step, hand-performed calculation has been used to check the accuracy of computer programs.
The computer is well suited to do lengthy mathematical calculations, like those needed to predict the weather, the motions and properties of stellar interiors, the motions of the materials within fusion machines, or the airflow around proposed airplane wing shapes. (Visit http://www-vis.lbl.gov/Vignettes, www.nchc.org.tw/en/htdocs/core_technology/application_research_develop/visualization//vr_result.php, and www.ecs.umass.edu/mie/faculty/perot/movies.htm for videos resulting from the computer modeling of various systems.) Most of today's technology involves mathematical procedures that would require many person's lifetimes to tackle but are instead performed in a matter of minutes on a computer. In the past it was common to do fifty- to one-hundred-page calculations by hand. Today the computer can do calculations involving thousands of pages. For this reason our civilization can now accomplish more complicated tasks. Here are a few of them.
The incremental motions of thousands of gravitationally interacting particles are calculated by figuring the initial gravitational force between each pair of particles. Each particle will have a different net force at each moment in time. Each particle is then moved slightly in the direction of the net force that it is experiencing, and then the entire process is repeated. After many time steps the trajectories of each particle can be computed. This is done by the computer in seconds but would require years for a team of people.
Geologists constantly record earthquake data all over the Earth's surface. The earthquake originates in a small volume deep inside the Earth and this causes seismic waves to spread out in every direction from that region. The magnitudes and characteristics of these seismic waves are altered by the materials through which they have passed. Geologists use computers to process this huge collection of data to figure out the Earth's underground features and materials. Visit www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/simulation6_pga.mov for an animation showing the sequence of earthquakes in Southern Californian through a four-hundred-year period. Visit www.iris.iris.edu/sumatra/movie_second.htm for an animation of the propagation of earthquake waves throughout the Earth. Visit http://solidearth.jpl.nasa.gov/rp.html for various geological simulations. For tsunami simulations, visit http://ceeserver.cee.cornell.edu/pll-group/simulation.html.
Physicists design and then use accelerators to measure elementary particle properties. The motions and energies of millions of elementary particles are constantly being measured. Without computer processing, it would take lifetimes to analyze the data collected in a few minutes. Progress in understanding new aspects of nature would not be made very quickly without the computer. For a video explanation, you might like to visit http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS/Samples/detectors.ram.
The computer makes magical new medical tools possible. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), see www.rwc.uc.edu/koehler/biophys/5c.html, and computer aided tomography (CAT) allow us to see inside the body. The magnetic resonance imaging machine creates a map of interior tissue types by measuring the time it takes for each tiny spot within the body to become aligned with an applied magnetic field that is temporarily turned on, and the time needed to become unaligned after switching off that magnetic field. This occurs in a fraction of a second so that thousands of body-sections are measured in a few seconds. It would take years to create these images by hand. There are also many people busy measuring alignment and un-alignment times for various types of tissues that are in various states of health. In this way, the times are known before people are placed into these machines. Visit www.digimorph.org for CT scans. For a sample MRI video, visit http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/Dynamic_MRI.html, or to see a video of a heart in motion, visit www.4hcm.org/WCMS/download.php?id=320779,43,2. For sample CT and MRI scans, you might visit www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_gallery.html.
If a rod is placed inside a tube and then both pieces are given an electrical charge, their combined electrical properties will depend on the portion of the rod that is inside the tube. Next, bolt the rod to a moving machinery part but bolt the tube to a “unmovable wall,” which is a section of that same machine that does not move. Next, measure and record the combined electrical properties of the rod and tube as the machine is operating and moving. In this way you create a record of the motion of the machine's parts. Finally, place this machine in a lab and connect the rod and tube to a computer-controlled hydraulic system. The computer opens and closes hydraulic valves so that fluid can be pumped into or removed from the rod and tube device. Hundreds of times per second, the computer compares the previously recorded position and movements of the rod with current measurements of the rod's position and movement. The computer will open and close the hydraulic valves to reproduce the machine's previous movements. The result is that the computer controlled hydraulic system can force that machine to repeat the motions it had made during its earlier operation.
The company MTS in Minneapolis, Minnesota (see www.mts.com) has done this to record the motions of train, plane, and mine-shaft sections and automobile components, including suspensions, tires, and front-ends. They have recorded the motions of an automobile as it was driven around streets full of chuck-holes and obstacles. The automobile is made to perform high-speed maneuvers while the motions of its parts are being recorded. Back in the laboratory, each of the four wheels of that car is placed onto its own conveyor belt, and these four belts are then moved at the speed the car had been previously driven. The belts are made to tilt and rise and fall just as the road had done earlier. As one stands by this machine, the car wheels are seen to be moving at full speed while the car is tilting, rising, and falling without going anywhere; it is running in place. In this way engineers can stand under the car and watch each of its parts in motion as if they were flying alongside the car as it was being driven. The result is that road has been recorded and can be replayed within the lab. Hundreds of times each second the computer is controlling hundreds of individual valves.
The computer is well suited to maintain huge numbers of records. It can recall one of trillions of records in a fraction of a second, as is done by internet search engines. Today, even a $1,000 personal computer could hold a 1,000 character tax record of each person within a nation of 300 million persons. Larger and more expensive computers hold much more information. Today’s largest computers hold records of every purchase made by every person. Computer records can include the shelf-location of the items you bought and track everything you chose not to buy though it was sitting right next to an item you did buy. This is accomplished with the personal information made possible by the I.D. tags that stores now want you to use, see www.nocards.org.
The I.D. tags provide records that are analyzed for purchasing patterns in an attempt to increase sales in any possible way. (For more about “data mining,” see http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~awm/tutorials.) This is done in every industry–and in politics, too. Politicians maintain records of voter preferences so that they can tailor their outgoing mail and phone calls to each individual voter. Computer generated mail sen to you by a politician can include a query about your grandmother Thelma whom you had mentioned in an earlier letter that you had sent to that politician.
The entire manufacturing process of any item, large or small, is accomplished with computers. Blueprints, diagrams, and electrical circuit schematics and such are developed on the computer instead of being written on paper. These diagrams are then available on a computer screen in the manufacturing, marketing, sales, and billing departments, and even at the shop where the consumer later takes the purchase for repairs. For example, an engine is designed with computer aided drafting software. Additional software is used to track the source and cost of each part, guide its manufacture, assign part numbers, and produce the manuals and documentation that will be used in marketing and servicing the engine.
Some tedious chores take long periods of time to complete, so it is appropriate to program a computer to accomplish these tasks. This includes problems that have no apparent, single-best solution but instead have millions of possible solutions that must be investigated in a trial-and-error search. This is the way computers are programmed to play chess. The program is designed to try millions of moves to see if an obvious benefit occurs for any of them. Other examples include the "traveling salesperson" sorts of problems which involve finding the shortest route through each of one hundred cities. There isn't really any way to find the shortest route except by trying each of the millions of possible routes. The same problem occurs when designing a machine to make hundreds of welds on a circuit board. Instead of a salesperson traveling to each of several cities, the welding machine must travel to each of several welding spots.
The internet is giving us more options for shopping, entertainment, news, and communication. Now, every musical band can put their music on the internet without having to be subject to the restrictions and whims of a few business operators looking for financially-safe clones to distribute. For example, listen to my friend Justin Hoenke’s incredible music www.rockerie.com/thescene/bands/225 and www.myspace.com/belsapadore. In Chapter 1, Justin described the creative process for us. Music need only be distributed by the internet. Similarly, every author can now make their manuscripts available through the internet. This means that we can select music and books from every artist and author throughout the planet instead of having to choose from the small number that business personnel have decided to make available because it closely resembles a work that sold millions in the previous year. There will be a tremendous number of choices and it will continue to be the case that recommendations from others result in the most-popular books, movies, and music. We are better off now that each person can select from the works of every artist and author placed on the internet.
The smallest businesses today use the computer to keep up with repetitive paperwork in the same way that only the largest businesses did in previous decades. Inventory and material levels are maintained, payroll amounts and records are generated, statements are sent to the company's customers, checks are printed to pay the company's bills, and all of the accounting is done to track sales, costs, expenses, assets, liabilities, and to generate balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements.
The computers of interrelated businesses are now being connected to automate transactions. For example, computers at the sales counter of retail stores are now being connected to other computers at the distribution warehouse, and even at the manufacturing plant. As the consumer buys green shirts at a retail store, computers are decreasing stock levels at that store and letting the manufacturer and distributor know that they might want to produce another copy of that item and ship it to the retail store. The manufacturer, distributor, and retail store are each tracking consumer purchases and preferences. An out-of-stock item can be ordered for a customer who is at the retail store, and the store clerk can tell the customer when the goods will be available. This business-to-business interface is just beginning. It will occur within a few decades that every economic indicator, such as the Gross National Product, will be computed in real-time (during each second) because every business transaction will be handled by interconnected computers. This means that as you buy a product at a retail store you can then see the increase in the Gross National Product displayed on a computer screen. Even more important for us will be a continual monitoring of social indicators, as described in Chapter 22.
A computer contains a set of single-purpose, numbered circuits, just one of which is turned on during each time-step. A computer program is a list containing the order in which those numbered circuits should be enabled to complete a particular task. Trying to computerize the processes of object and face recognition, communication, learning to maneuver through terrain filled with obstacles, recognizing predators and food, understanding social situations, and building nests and such makes us better appreciate the intelligence of even the "simplest" animals.
Linux is a personal computer version of the fifty-year-old Unix operating system that ran the $10 million computers of the past. No company owns Linux. The computer programmers of the world submit ideas for its improvements to a global committee that compares suggestions and chooses which features to include in the next version of the system. A surprising thing is that, before personal computer operating systems existed, nobody in history had ever paid for something they did not choose to buy. The Linux operating system is the answer to this problem because it is a world community project that is owned by no company. Any programmer can produce a new feature and then submit that improvement to a committee for inclusion in the operating system. This means that we won't be held hostage to the monetary aspirations of the leaders of any monopolizing company who manage to arrange that their product is "automatically included" by the computer hardware manufacturers–whether the purchaser wants it or not. I've been forced to pay for and then remove an unwanted operating system from many computers. Benefits to the consumer never grow in proportion to their decrease in choice. The world will surely refuse to go along with this silliness and instead choose public-domain Linux as the operating system for their computers.
Questions
1. Write down the steps needed to do one of your daily tasks.
2. In the example program above, what happens if the programmer doesn't tell the computer to make enough room for person's lengthy name, or accidentally tells the computer to write the response to the disk before it has been read from the keyboard?
3. Has the number of jobs increased or decreased due to the computerization of our civilization? How many persons have lost their job due to the computer industry and how many persons now work in the computer industry? Our civilization's traditional occupation was farming. How many persons are farmers today? If we place a computer modem on each home's electrical power meter then a person will no longer have to walk to each home to read its meter. Estimate how many persons will lose their job and how many persons will gain a job due to this change.
4. Will computers be the downfall of society and civilization? In earlier chapters we saw that this was said about writing, entertainment, and probably fire and wheels, too. What does this tell us about ourselves?
5. Compare the features of five operating systems.
6. Create a piece of art that describes computers.
7. Compare the abilities of today's computers with those of humans, fish, ants, worms, and an amoeba.
8. Can one program a computer to perform the same functions that occur inside a single-celled organism, such as a bacteria?
Suggestions for further reading
Computer System Architecture, 3rd edition, M. Morris Mano, 1992, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
A history of computing is given in Jerry Mechling's article Electronic Government that describes the use of computers in government and is found in the book, A Historical Guide to the U.S. Government, edited by George T. Kurian, 1998, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.
C4.5, Programs for Machine Learning, J Ross Quinlan, 1993, Morgan Kaufman Publishers, San Mateo, CA.
Copyright © 2009 Robert Dalling, www.UsHumans.net