In Search of Certainty

Introduction: The Hallowed Halls

“Our great computers Fill the hallowed halls”

Neil Peart, Rush, 2112

Quite soon, the world’s information infrastructure is going to reach a level of scale and complexity that will force scientists and engineers to think about it in an entirely new way. The familiar notions of command and control, which have held temporary dominion over our systems, are now being thwarted by the realities of a faster, denser world of communication, a world where choice, variety, and indeterminism rule. The myth of the machine, that does exactly what we tell it, has come to an end.

Many of the basic components of information infrastructure, including computers, storage devices, networks, and so forth, are by now relatively familiar; however, each generation of these devices adds new ways to adapt to changing needs, and what happens inside them during operation has influences that originate from all over the planet. This makes their behaviour far from well understood even by the engineers who build and use them. How does that affect predictability, their usefulness?

It is now fair to draw a parallel between the structures we build to deliver information, and the atomic structure of materials that we engineer for manufacturing, like metals and plastics¹. Although these things seem far removed from one another, occupying very different scales, they have a basic similarity: physical materials are made of atoms and molecules networked through chemical bonding into structures ...