Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

We are creatures of imagination. We indulge in fantasy. At least, some of us are, and do.

Geeks surely do. Programmers, for instance. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, had and has a wild imagination. He loves science fiction. He acquired a marvelous collection of sci-fi, supports the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, and gave it his collection.

Allen’s super-serious former partner, Bill Gates, had the crazy idea that there would be a PC in every home. But never in his wildest nightmares did he suppose that a lot of them would be made by Apple.

When I spent lots of time coding, I used “if…then” constructions. That’s the syntax of speculation, isn’t it? That’s indulging in the hypothetical, right?

Our very capable McKean County budget director, Dustin Laurie, laboring in solitude behind a high counter in his office, makes numbers dance, using spreadsheets in his choreography. So mysterious is he that I refer to him as the Gnome, in tribute to his magical powers. Of course I would not presume to observe his actual budget crafting  in progress, but his dark art must involve playing “what if” in Excel.

When the year 1984 rolled around we had a blast comparing George Orwell’s predictions with the realities of that time. Amazing how much he got right in “nineteen Eighty-Four,”, writing way back in 1949. Orwell was a dour dystopian, so his vision of the then future was way over the top (or under the bottom) as to things trending worse. Such grim exaggerations!

Or maybe the timing was off by a decade or two in his projections. All that stuff about the Proles, the Outers and the Inners and the all-powerful government and the people’s loss of privacy, with telescreens everywhere!

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is much more fun. Douglas Adams was a keen observer of culture and the role of technology, and a satirist of no mean ability—positively benign. Orwell had not foreseen computers, not specifically anyway, but Adams saw our planet as a supercomputer that needed to be demolished.

Those who have read “Hitchhiker” remember that the answer to the question of life, universe and everything was “42.” They will understand why a new “IT University” in Paris has been christened “42.” It has been endowed by private investors who hope it will train new crops of French engineers.

Some very solid scientists have doubled as masters of that chimerical genre of fiction, science fiction. Think Isaac Asimov, just for starters. And when we think of the conceivers of some of the most change-driving concepts imaginable, we include Brin and Page, and Zuckerberg, and Cerf and Berners-Lee, and Walker, just for starters. Well, they were, quite literally, starters, active and transitive, but probably even they did not know what all they were starting.

Google, the behemoth of search, was the brainchild of the union of Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s brains. Mark Zuckerberg had a wild notion that everybody in cyberspace could achieve virtual facetime through Facebook. Vint Cerf was sure there was a way to network computers on a global scale, and Tim Berners-Lee extrapolated and projected from that a WorldWide Web. John Walker helped revolutionize the fields of engineering and design with AutoCAD.

“Hitchhiker” featured a robot that, or who, was depressed. A matter of programming, we would suppose—like us, the robot would need to be analyzed, and could be better adjusted.

Science probes for answers to “if” and “what if.” Sci-fi is entertaining, but so is science, as it sets us wondering. What if we could travel in space? Oh, that’s right, some people do. What if world population got out of hand, and food scarcity drove us to atavistic aggression, or hunger games?

Impossible technologies have become feasible, and have undergone change, wave after wave, to become ubiquitous. We have watched and listened as telephony took to the airways and handheld or palmtop computers learned to speak and phones became smart. Palm and Blackberry were ahead of their time, then fell behind or were trampled by their progeny and imitators.

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Ron Tyson alerted me to some pending legislation in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, (HB 1608) that would let phone companies discontinue landline service to residential customers in some areas. Also, the companies could raise rates to rural customers, and might be freed from regulation.

A phone call from AARP had told Ron about this. There is a Senate bill too. Other states have been considering such measures—Michigan is one.

Delivering services is harder in rural areas. But rural consumers are even more dependent on wide-ranging communication and other services than are urban residents. More about these proposed changes later.