We’re in a locked-room mystery, with water rushing in, or conversely with the air being sucked out. Thrashing, flailing, only makes it worse. Time is roaring away…think like Houdini!

Which is to say, use design thinking to escape the predicament and find a lasting solution.

Design thinking is all about affordances and constraints.

Take the constraints we face today in core technologies, the measures that have determined our progress to date but that increasingly signal our imminent collision with the production frontier.

Moore’s Law is no longer valid.

It appears that Keck’s Law is also suffering diminishing impact:

“For the past few decades, a series of new developments have allowed communications engineers to keep pushing more and more bits down fiber-optic networks. But the easy gains are behind them. To keep moving forward, they’ll need to conjure up some fairly spectacular innovations.”

Ditto for Kryder’s Law relating to disk drive storage capacity.

And, as the head of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research notes:

“…battery technology … is approaching its theoretical maximum performance. […] we might be able to get 50% to 100% better performance, but certainly no more than that. To create a true energy transformation, we will have to deploy new technological strategies.”

Most fundamentally, the nonlinear Shannon limit rapidly approaches,described here by Markus Hofmann, head of Bell Labs Research in New Jersey, the research and development arm of Alcatel–Lucent:

“We know there are certain limits that Mother Nature gives us — only so much information you can transmit over certain communications channels. That phenomenon is called the nonlinear Shannon limit [named after former Bell Telephone Laboratories mathematician], and it tells us how far we can push with today’s technologies. We are already very, very close to this limit, within a factor of two roughly. Put another way, based on our experiments in the lab, when we double the amount of network traffic we have today — something that could happen within the next four or five years — we will exceed the Shannon limit. That tells us there’s a fundamental roadblock here. There is no way we can stretch this limit, just as we cannot increase the speed of light. So we need to work with these limits and still find ways to continue the needed growth.”

Right then, sleeves rolled up, time to solve the puzzle! We need to be sure today’s young learners start attacking these problems now. Let’s excite their vibrant, multifaceted, “know-no-limits” minds with these very real-world challenges — ones that they above all will live with.

Is Moore’s Law (and the more precise understanding that it is not a law but a rule of thumb) discussed in our middle and high school classrooms? Shannon’s Limit, Keck’s Law and the other constraints should be taught along side staples such as Ohm’s Law, the laws of thermodynamics and of Newtonian motion.

As we seek to Houdini our way over, around and through these constraints, let our young folks guide us with their tangential breaks, their off-the-wall ideas and mash-up, hip-hop sensibilities. Young people will discover or invent the new technology that vaults us forward, re-setting the paradigm for yet another generation.

By Daniel A. Rabuzzi
Executive Director, Mouse
daniel@mouse.org

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