Making Things

My entire professional career is based on a fact that was largely unimaginable to my parent’s generation. I get paid to create software which, outside of the storage media that hold it or its representation in computer memory as 1’s and 0’s, has no physical presence in the world. I get paid for making something that exists as an abstraction running in a computer. That is a very, very bizarre thing.

Certainly there have been folks who have been compensated for making something that doesn’t have any intrinsic value or perform any specific action or purpose. Writers write, musicians create and play music that only exist as symbols on a page until they are summoned in to reality as sound. So, there is some parallel, I suppose.

In truth, I’ve never made anything physical that anyone paid me for. I’ve worked service jobs in high school and college and ever after worked in software where the results of my labor exist on a physical storage media and as a running program on a computer. Certainly I’m thankful for the opportunity because it’s hard for me to image what I’d be doing a hundred years ago. My poor vision might have been somewhat correctable, but certainly not as precisely as it is today, so that would have limited me in a number of ways.

For my entire career, the results of my work have been used by others to create actual things. My first professional job was to create simulation models of discrete electronic elements like processors and memories. These could be assembled to run in a simulated environment to test a customer’s design prior to the very expensive process of fabricating an actual, physical prototype. Our models and tools saved customers millions of dollars in expensive prototypes and months of time because simulation was faster and cheaper.

I knew that what I created was used by companies like Intel to design computers, consumer companies like Sony to make a DVD player, Nintendo to make a gaming system or even a company making a portable defibrillator or medical imaging device. While I never made anything physical, I had a second-hand role in making some of those things possible or at least making them possible faster and cheaper. I was able to feel pretty good about what I was doing, for the most part, even if it was only second hand.

In my late 20s, after I’d been making software models for six or eight years, we had a customer visit. This was kind of a rare thing for us in Portland, because customers often didn’t make it out here from the East Coast or up from California. In this case, the customer was going to share what they were doing and how our products helped contribute to what they were building.

But, here was the rub: It was a defense contractor. In fact, the product that they came to talk to us about and how our products contributed to their success was a guided missile.

For the first time, the possibility that something I helped build might be something that could be used to hurt someone instead of help someone went from a potential to a reality.

I recall that some of my co-workers actually expressed some discomfort as they, too, dealt with the reality of how our products were used.

The day for the visit came and the entire company went to the presentation. There might have been free lunch, that was usually the best way to assure good attendance.

The customer launched in to their presentation and described their product, going in to some detail but not a great deal since it was largely classified.

Part way in to the presentation, they began to talk about a problem they’d had with one of our models and how it had taken some time to get a bug resolved. They described a memory device that had something called a “half-full” flag. Imagine an opaque tube that holds 100 marbles, but you want to know when it’s half full. If the tube is half-full of marbles, this flag goes up so you know that your tube is now half-full. The problem was the vendor of the memory device had not stated clearly whether the half-full flag was triggered on the 50th marble or the 51st marble.

Something in my memory started to raise its hand and ask for attention. Sure enough, as the description of the problem proceeded, it became clear that the model in question and the problem they were referring to that had cost them time was written by me. Yay.

In my defense, it was a poorly written specification and the vendor failed to respond in a timely fashion to our requests for clarification. Whichever way the actual device operated, my model did the other. At least until the issue was identified, fixed and tested and released to the customer. Again.

So, yeah, the major thing the customer came to complain about was something I did. That wasn’t my favorite free lunch.

But, the thing that was striking about that lunch, more than the realization that I’d caused them no little trouble, was that suddenly something I had made was being used to make a guided missile which could conceivably be used to kill people. That was an uncomfortable realization that went from possibility to truth.

But, like a hammer, what I made could be used to build a house or to whack someone on the head. Once the tool is created, its use is largely out of hands of the creator of the tool.

I had a similar realization again with my current job.

My new company enables the analysis of vast amounts of data much more quickly than was possible in the past. That sounds fairly benign and it can be.

On the positive side, it can be used to speed sequencing DNA more quickly and to analyze large data sets of medical information for correlation much more quickly than ever before.

On the neutral side, it can be used to analyze trends in data for things like optimizing the maintenance on everything from a jet engine to a wind turbine so that they focus maintenance where it’s needed as opposed to just applying it blindly after a given number of hours of flight time, as they do now.

On the negative side, it can be used to analyze trends in people’s buying habits in real time, allowing vendors to adjust prices also in real time to maximize profits. It can be used by a booking site to analyze where folks are booking hotels for Spring Break and adjust the prices on those venues to, again, maximize profits. The amount of data that can be divined from sifting through large amounts of consumer data is kind of scary.

But, like the hammer from earlier, it’s a tool. It can be used for good or it can be used for ill. The intent is applied by the user, not the guy who created the hammer.

In the end, I guess it will come down to whether you believe that over time we’ll use the tool to improve lives (on the whole) or use the data simply as a resource to make more wealth. In fact, as I think about it, I suspect the profits generated pay the bills and may end up funding the less profitable work which may be for the greater good. I suspect the reality will be both, but we’ll see.