Jaron Lanier tries to get his arms around the issue of software scalability.
The reason we’re stuck on temporal protocols is probably that information systems do meet our expectations when they are small. They only start to degrade as they…
There was a time when I thought Lanier was just a flake with a good PR agent. Then I had the chance to listen to him speak at length about the deep challenges of technology development. He’s still in the tail of the distribution on a number of dimensions, but the quality of his thinking and insight into the opportunities and challenges of technology is in the right tail.
While checking out Lanier’s current thoughts on software, you might also want to look at his “One Half of a Manifesto.”