intrust

A tolerance of particular interest is that of time. Since there is no limit as to how exact time can be, all interactions must be time tolerant to some extent. In our pocket watch example, which is of course about an object built to keep time, tolerance is kept at a minimum, while in the societal verosphere it is customarily more relaxed. You are given perhaps 30 days to pay a bill or file a claim, you may show up a few minutes late to a meeting or class, or even a court appearance. But that doesn’t mean we are not in sync – we most definitely are. Time is the ultimate truth in any verosphere.

Computers are also time tolerant, but the time tolerances of things working at gigahertz speeds are not something users tend to think about. Of course, certain operations seem sluggish, like when programs start up. When we have to wait for our computers we get annoyed. But think about this from the computers point of view: It spends 99.999 per cent of its existence waiting for us¹.

As long as we set the schedules, lack of synchronization between humans and machines is a manageable problem. Where the everyday human verosphere meets the computer verosphere, the machines must do the waiting – or so it has mostly been in the past. As more super fast machines are inserted into human verospheres this relationship can easily change.

// posted by Greg FitzPatrick @ 11:26