IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2019 - 51

Column: Bits vs. Electronics

Bits vs. Things
Bob Frankston

& I AM WRITING this for CE Magazine rather than
Computer Magazine because I do not see programming and software as something apart from
the larger world but as the language we use to
articulate our understanding. Software has transformed consumer electronics.
In 1997, I teleported a toy truck 3,000 miles
from New York City to Seattle. My mother
handed me the toy and asked me to send it to
her grandson (my nephew) in Seattle. I said that
it would be there within an hour. And it was-at
one instant the truck was in New York and then
it was in Seattle.
Just like the transporter, the fictional teleportation machine from Star Trek, except that it is
for real. I realized I did not have to send the
atoms. I just needed to send the instructions for
how to (re)create the truck at the destination.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2019.2923931

Moving from theory to practice, how does
one transmit a physical object? You send the
instructions for assembly of the object at end
point. Nothing profound there. No more profound than Copernicus shifting a reference point
for the solar system by 1.5Â1,014 meters. He
changed nothing yet he invented the idea of a
solar system and displaced people from the center of the universe.
I simply returned the toy truck to the nearest
store and sent my brother the SKU (stocking
unit number) of the toy so he could buy it from
the local store.
This is the power of learning by doing and in
solving real problems rather than accepting the
constraints of an artificial problem. If I had been
told to implement Star Trek teleportation as
specified, I would have failed.
A telecommunications channel is simply a
mathematical model-a fiction. Yet, it is treated
as a real constraint.
The Internet approach does not have such a
construct. I just get best efforts packet delivery
as a resource. It is up to me to discover what
I can do with that opportunity using software.
I am also aware that I am not sending content
as much as references to content (the SKU).
The difference can be subtle but, in the age of
software, understanding the interplay between
names and things gives us the ability to reinvent
the world.

Date of current version 30 August 2019.

September/October 2019

Published by the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society

2162-2248 ß 2019 IEEE

51



IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2019

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