New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

Another effect, according to many in the industry, was the end of a culture of craft, care, and efficiency in software itself. While early software developers had to make a virtue of scarce resources, endlessly optimising their code and coming up with ever more elegant and economical solutions to complex calculation problems, the rapid advancement of raw computing power meant that programmers only had to wait eighteen months for a machine twice as powerful to come along. Why be parsimonious with one’s resources when biblical plenty is available in the next sales cycle? In time, the founder of Microsoft himself became associated with another computer scientist’s rule of thumb: Gates’s law, which claims that, as a result of wasteful and inefficient code and redundant features, the speed of software halves every eighteen months.