Bruce Sterling has a new science fictional monologue in Rudy Rucker’s latest issue of Flurb. When I think about recreating Tampa this is what I’m thinking about. Vision. We need to be looking ahead. Tampa needs to start now to be among the leaders in cloud computing in a quarter century.
Computer Entertainment Thirty-Five Years From Today
So, I did some careful research on that subject. I realized that, yeah, for an old-fashioned audience like you, a mid-21st century computer is pretty amazing. So here it is. (Speaker pulls cloth napkin from podium).
This is my General Electric Pocket Mediator. This one’s about five years old, it’s a student’s model. Personal mediators are a stable technology in my time, we don’t have to fuss with them much. Unfortunately it doesn’t have full functionality here in 2008, because we don’t have the cloud yet. As soon as I reached here, my Mediator reached out for the cloud to reload its apps and OS… and it tapped into something called “Window-Vista.” Then it just plain gave up. It’s gone completely limp now. There’s nothing left here but this frozen screen-saver pattern.
So I’m gonna have to kind of walk you through its many functionalities. Bear with me here. Moore’s law says computer power doubles every eighteen months—since I’m from 35 years in the future, that means twenty three doublings. So a laptop from my time is the rough equivalent of about eight million, three hundred and eighty-eight thousand, six hundred eight of your best laptops. But, like I said, this is just a cheap student’s model, several years behind the times. So it’s feeble. It’s no more than thirty two thousand, seven hundred and sixty eight of your computers.
As you can see, my computer is a network. Literally a network, because all the components are woven. It’s all fabric. The power cables are superconductive fiber—they’re charged up with ambient light through quantum solar nanodots. It also has shape-changing piezo-electric threads woven through it—threads that move, they’re a lot like muscle tissue—so it can expand, contract, fold itself up, even flap and fly around the room.
