Computing and exponentialism

I return to a theme I’ve discussed before… thoughts that come my way while listening to radio programs on the infernal drive in to the office.  Today’s program was about Google’s driver-less car.  It’s exactly what the phrase implies,  a car that drives itself using sophisticated computer hardware and software.  It won a competition and, apparently, even the engineers who lost the competition were impressed.  Anyway, the only thing I want to add is a comment on one particular statistic I heard from the engineer who was interviewed on today’s show.  He mentioned that the car’s computer collects 1 million data points every single second.  It uses those points to calculate a myriad of decisions it needs to make in subsequent seconds, decisions that we humans don’t even think about but make every time we’re behind the wheel of our cars.

That statistic caused me to recall a recent conversation I had with a customer.   He was relating to me that the monitoring tool his company uses (bought from my employer) collects 12 million “events” (anomalies in the system) per MONTH.  I don’t present that here for comparison purposes.  I merely raise it to suggest that the numbers we are dealing with since the advent of the computer are very, very large (like the debts of some countries) and there seems to be no way to get a grip on them unless we exploit the power of the computer even more.