Software and Cement

While Bazalgette's design of the sewer network was certainly important, in hindsight the selection and qualification of Portland cement was arguably the most critical aspect to the project's success. Had Bazalgette not enforced strict quality control on production of Portland cement, the outcome of the "Great Stink of London" might have been far different. Due to Bazalgette's efforts and the resounding success of the London sewer system, Portland cement progressed in a few short years from "promising but risky" to the industry standard used in just about every major construction project from that time onward.

Portland cement's popularity then, is due not just to its physical properties, but in large part to Bazalgette's strict and rigorous quality tests, which drastically reduced potential uncertainties associated with Portland cement's production. At present, more than 20 separate tests are used to ensure the quality of Portland cement, significantly more than Bazalgette himself employed. World production of Portland cement exceeded two billion metric tons in 2005, with China accounting for nearly half of that production followed closely by India and the United States.⁸ This works out to roughly 2.5 tons of cement for every person on the planet. Without Portland cement, much of modern civilization as we know it, see it, live on it, and drive on it would fail to exist.

Cement is everywhere in modern civilization. Mixed with aggregates such as sand and stone, it forms concrete that comprises roadways, bridges, tunnels, building foundations, walls, floors, airports, docks, dams, aqueducts, pipes, and the list goes on. Cement is—quite literally—the foundation of modern civilization, creating the infrastructure that supports billions of lives around the globe. One cannot live in modern civilization without touching, seeing, or relying on cement in one way or another. Our very lives depend on cement, yet cement has proven so reliable due to strict quality controls that it has to a large extent disappeared from our field of concerns—even though we are surrounded by it. Such is the legacy of Bazalgette's commitment to quality: We can live our lives without thinking twice about what is beneath our feet, or more importantly, what may be above our head.

Civilization depends on infrastructure, and infrastructure depends, at least in part, on durable, reliable cement. Due to its versatility, cost-effectiveness, and broad availability, cement has provided options in construction that could not otherwise be attained with stone, wood, or steel alone. But since the 1950s, a new material has been slowly and unrelentingly injected into modern infrastructure, one that is far more versatile, cost-effective, and widely available than cement could ever hope to be. It also just so happens to be invisible and unvisualizable. In fact, it is not a material at all. It is software.

Like cement, software is everywhere in modern civilization. Software is in your mobile phone, on your home computer, in cars, airplanes, hospitals, businesses, public utilities, financial systems, and national defense systems. Software is an increasingly critical component in the operation of infrastructures, cutting across almost every aspect of global, national, social, and economic function. One cannot live in modern civilization without touching, being touched by, or depending on software in one way or another.

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Like cement, software is everywhere in modern civilization.

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Software helps deliver oil to our cities, electricity to our homes, water to our crops, products to our markets, money to our banks, and information to our minds. It allows us to share pictures, music, thoughts, and ideas with people we might meet infrequently in person but will intimately know from a distance. Everything is becoming "smarter" because software is being injected into just about every thing. Software has accelerated economic growth through the increased facilities of managing labor and capital with unprecedented capacity. Hundreds of thousands of people if not millions owe their livelihoods to software. With its aid, we have discovered new medicines, new oil fields, and new planets and it has given us new ways of visualizing old problems, thereby finding solutions we might never have had the capacity, time, or ability to discover without it. With software we are able to build bridges once thought impossible, create buildings once thought unrealistic, and explore regions of earth, space, and self once thought unreachable.

Software has also given us the Internet, a massive world-wide network connecting all to all. In fact, connectedness in the twenty-first century is primarily a manifestation of software. Software handles the protocols necessary for communication, operates telecommunications equipment, bundles data for transmission, and routes messages to far-flung destinations as well as giving function and feature to a dizzying array of devices. Software helps connect everything to everything else with the network—the Internet—merely a by-product of its function. Without software, the network would be just a bunch of cables, just as a human cell without DNA would be just a bunch of amino acids and proteins.

Software is everywhere; it is everywhere because software is the closest thing we have to a universal tool. It exhibits a radical malleability that allows us to do with it what we will. Software itself is nothing more than a set of commands that tells a computer processor (a microchip) what to do. Connect a microchip to a toy, and the toy becomes "smart;" connect a microchip to a car's fuel injector, and the car becomes more fuel efficient; connect it to a phone, and the phone becomes indispensable in life's everyday affairs. Connect a microchip to just about anything, and just about anything is possible because the software makes it so. Software is the ghost in the machine, the DNA of technology; it is what gives things the appearance of intelligence when none can possibly exist.

The only aspect of software more impressive than software itself is the people that create software. Computer programmers, also known as software developers or software engineers, write the instructions that tell computers what to do. Software developers are in large part a collection of extremely talented and gifted individuals whose capacity to envision and implement algorithms of extraordinary complexity and elegance gives us search engines, operating systems, word processors, instant messaging, mobile networks, satellite navigation, smart cars, advanced medical imaging; the list goes on. As such, software is a human creation, and as a human creation it is subject to the strengths and foibles of humanity. This is where the similarities of cement and software become most interesting.

Software, like cement before it, is becoming the foundation of civilization. Our very lives are becoming more dependent on and subject to software. As such, the properties of software matter greatly: quality, reliability, security, each by themselves accomplish very little, but their absence faults everything else. Like Portland cement, software can be unreliable if production processes vary even slightly. Whereas variations in kiln temperatures, mixture ratios, or grinding processes can detrimentally affect the strength and durability of Portland cement after it has been poured, there are a host of similar, seemingly trivial variations in producing software that can detrimentally affect its "strength" when "poured" into microchips. It is up to humans to get the production process right.