Dana Blankenhorn

The Death of Office Work

There’s a lot of debate going on about the “death of the office.” (To the right, the 1960 movie The Apartment, about the abuses of office life in your parents' time.)

Workers find they like working from home. Employers say they want us back at their desks.

What no one asks is whether we need an office at all.

What does an office do? It acts as a control point, an organizing structure. It’s where data is collected and where decisions are made. But that definition doesn’t require a lot of space or a lot of workers.

In software, an office is a factory. My wife spent 37 years on that floor, before COVID. Since then, she’s been at home. It’s a better location. It’s quieter. Coordination can be done by phone. She doesn’t need the commute, and her employer doesn’t need the expense.

The AI Silly Season

We’re currently in the “silly season” of hype over “Generative AI,” machine learning programs whose output can be text, code, pictures, audio, or video.

There’s a lot of experimentation and there are a ton of bad takes.

Here’s how it’s going to go.

There are two things to know.

First, any software requires training before it becomes useful. Right now programs like ChatGPT are creating garbage. Interesting garbage, but garbage. As people learn how to get value from these tools, however, there will be huge jumps in productivity. The timing and size will differ from industry to industry, and from organization to organization. But it will happen. People will be able to do more, high-quality work in less time. This won’t reduce the need for people. It will give people more things to do.

Where Computing Happens

I met my first computer in 1976, in the basement of Herman Brown Hall, on the campus of Rice University in Houston.

The computing happened in a big room, separated from me by a window. I passed a stack of punch cards, tied with a rubber band, through the window. They came back along with my output. Which usually said the program had died on Line 3.

By the time I got out of journalism school, two years later, computing was moving to desktops. A neighbor bought a $20,000 Cromemco machine that could run 3 terminals. She hired friends to work at the terminals, transcribing court records. I think they got 50 cents a page. Computing had come home.

2023: Look on the Bright Side

If we’re to get through 2023 alive, we’re going to have to take joy where we find it.

We certainly didn’t find it in journalism this year. Editors on every beat have taken to writing aggressive, clickbait headlines, designed to provoke feelings of anger and depression. They do it because they’re rewarded by the algorithms of a failing Internet business model. They do it to boost traffic.

This is even true on my business beat, where every negative headline has a positive corollary. Rising prices create incentives and profits for producers. Rising interest rates mean savers can finally catch a break. Layoffs create opportunity for other employers while the job market remains tight.

The headlines are misleading because they take just one side. They make it appear the economy and markets are terrible even though the former is not.

Real vs. Real

Analysts, and investors, are always fighting the last war.

The last war was the asset bubbles of the 1990s and 2000s. The first was in tech. The second was in housing.

Both fell after the bubble hit. Both times the government responded by juicing demand, first with the “forever wars,” then with a domestic stimulus and helicopter money.

Both times, this worked because the problem wasn’t related to what happened during the 1970s. Back then, resource inflation was to be feared. There was no substitute for oil. Now it’s just speculation and its aftermath.

The same kind of blow-off is happening now. There’s a fear that money will cost money, so speculators are pulling back, selling everything else to raise cash. (Cash is doing fine.) So far, it’s not nearly as bad as what came before. But fear is gripping the market because, this time, it’s accompanied by inflation.

Lessons of the Labor Shortage

There are three reasons for the current labor shortage. 

Two are signs of failure. One is a sign of success.

First, the failures.

The refusal of many employers, especially in the food service industry, to pay a living wage has long been a disgrace. They got away with it, in part, because America welcomed millions of immigrants, especially from Latin America. With the flow cut off, and other workers forced to fend for themselves for nearly a year, is it any wonder they won’t come back without more money?

This statement is controversial. I have friends who insist “people don’t want to work,” because they get more money not working. It’s not true, but my friends won’t budge. It might be because these friends are locked-in to their current positions, their current pay scale, their current lifestyle. I hate to say this of people I love, but there’s also some racism involved.

Living With Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future

This is actually the fourth edition of this book, which I have been writing and rewriting for 20 years now. 

Living With Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future is a collection of essays I have been working toward all my working life. It describes what Moore's Law is, how it developed, and how it extended into every area of computing through the 20th century.

Then it does more. I take the story into the present and explain just what we need to do, as a society, to take advantage of these miracles.

Then it does more. I have written an extra chapter about what comes next, the miracles that await us by harnessing the capabilities created by Moore's Law -- clouds, devices, and wireless networks. 

I consider it must reading for anyone interested in technology, in what it has done for us, what it's doing to us, and how we need to work with it to save the planet. 

Also, it's just $2.99. Free if you get it through Kindle Unlimited, Amazon's $10/month lending library. 

Cheap as chips.

Previous versions were offered as The Blankenhorn Effect in 2002, as Moore's Law: Better and Better, Faster and Faster in 2010, and as Technology's Big Bang: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with Moore's Law, in 2019. 

China Winning the Internet of Systems

Our capitalist system has a way of developing and defining standards that was effective in the 20^th century but may be ineffective early in the 21^st.

We wait for the market to create a need, and to create a leader. Then everyone else gangs up on the leader and creates what they call a standard.

Think of Betamax and VHS. Sony was the first mover, and the other manufacturers ganged up on it to take the consumer market. Or think of Apple and Microsoft in PC operating systems, where Microsoft, IBM, and their OEMs convinced most of the market to wait six full years for a working user interface Apple had introduced in 1984. The same thing is happening with Apple and Google in phones, although in this case Apple has managed to sponge off most of the profits and leave the OEMs toting Google’s laundry and holding the bag.

But there are areas of technology where that process doesn’t work, where only the government can create and enforce standards because the players are too selfish and diffuse to accomplish it themselves.

It’s why the Internet is the way it is. I was covering the story at the time it happened, so I know.

Revolt of the Viewer

The biggest life change in decades is now beginning. We are leaving an age of bundled, curated video content and entering an age of self-selected, self-curated content.

The unbundling of cable, the decision of millions to go “over the top” and choose instead to get their entertainment directly from the Internet, is one of the great sea changes of this decade, driven by rising costs and (perhaps more important) a shortage of time. Lost may be serendipity, the decision to watch things because they are on.

Today, for instance, I watched George Englund’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, a 1968 MGM film in which Anthony Quinn plays a radical cross between Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis, renouncing communism and wealth at the same time in the name of secular decency. Given that it was made early in the pontificate of Paul VI (John Gielgud gets one scene playing a nice version of Paul, then dies to make way for the plot) it is many decades ahead of its time. (Quinn’s character is even proclaimed a cardinal from Lvov, which is in western Ukraine, and a starving China drives the plot.) But it’s not what I would be watching if I had the whole world to choose from.

Days of Apps

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In 2012 the software industry is like an iceberg. Most of it is under the water.

Not underwater, mind you. Under the water.

That's because the world of “applications” is over. It's all about the apps now, brutha. And no one in the app business has yet gone public. The smart VC guys and private equity people are putting tons of money into the space, so there's no need to go public, no need to give the public investor a taste.

It's like the social boom. You'll know the bust has started when one of these outfits starts looking for suckers on NASDAQ.

Doesn't mean there's no there, there. There is. I found that out Monday when I went to a “MeetUp” for Techcrunch.com at the Sweetwater Brewery, a few miles from my home.

The place was packed. Cars were parked around the corner and down the next street. (They could do it because this is a warehouse district where everyone else goes home around 5 PM.) There were well over 3,000 people there. Mostly male, mostly young, mostly white. But not exclusively. I was also pleased to find two people who rode bikes there. A guy my own age who admitted he'd taken the train to a nearby transit stop, and a younger guy who'd ridden 8 miles in rush-hour traffic.