GenX Turns Fifty

I am blessed to be a part of post-World War Western culture of what we call Generation X. I am a forerunner, early in the Generation. The Baby Boomer Generation was ending and we were born in an analog age with the digital age just beginning. It was a time of invention, newness and wide-eyed curiosity. But the Generation grew up quickly and that has accelerated into our children today. Today they take technology, the Internet, wireless communications for granted. We still can use the technology to our advantage and remember a time before it all existed…. More on Gen X later. If you want you can read the Wikipedia article… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

We are living in the end of the beginning of the digital age. Yet, what we have from a computer infrastructure remains fragile. Let’s take the simple expression x = y / z. Seems very basic, yet a computer must absolutely make sure that z is never, ever, ever equal to zero. This simple fact is that there is no computer representation (or any real representation) for infinity. We can define it, but we can’t calculate it. All of this computer code running around… none of it can calculate or understand what a division by zero means. Most programmers do what they do best, avoid or prevent it. Some allow it, but handle it as an error and move on. Some define it, but what then? Let’s then divide the result again by zero. Or multiply it by two… What most people still do not realize is with all this technology, computers are still just very complex automatons. They won’t know anything they are not told. Even machine learning was programmed to learn a particular subset of human behavior, but ask it what’s its favorite pizza topping, no answer… So relax humanity. Humanity – we are still our own worst enemy… and will be for a very long time.