Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Knowledge multipliers are pieces of technology that allow for experiment and growth of knowledge. With each generation, they are more plentiful, powerful, and inexpensive.

1986 – I have finished three years of full-time graduate school. I earned an MS in EE and have completed all the course work towards a PhD. All I have to do is finish my experiments in computer vision and write a dissertation.

There were a few small hurdles in the way:

One, I have to return to work.

Two, I need a sufficiently powerful computer for my computer vision experiments.

I work around number one in the evenings and on weekends. I work around number two in early 1987. I buy a home computer for $3,000. It has an 80286 processor clocking at a leading-edge 10 MHz. The price tag was big for me, but something that I could manage. Four years of evenings and weekends later, I finished my degree on that same computer.

That computer was a knowledge multiplier. It enabled me to learn, experiment, learn, experiment, and turn the crank a bit on the computer vision knowledge base. Without it, I could not have completed my experiments. I would have been tied to the minicomputer at the lab at the college.

This story from my past came to mind recently when I saw this post. These college students built a self-balancing robot to enhance telepresence technology. They turned the crank a bit on the telepresence knowledge base. How could they do that? Simple, they had knowledge multipliers. Computers – powerful computers – are really cheap. So cheap that students can buy them. Telecommunications technology is cheap, really cheap. So cheap that a bunch of students can access knowledge bases in all parts of the world.

I see stories like this almost every week now. We live in an amazing age. There are knowledge multipliers all about us.

If I had some of the really cheap, really powerful knowledge multipliers available today when I was young… Well, I did have access for that access I am truly thankful.