Organic computing is the only way forward

WHAT DO YOU DO after running the research department at BT? Some people might retire, but Peter Cochrane is far too inquisitive and restless.

"I don't know that I can ever stop working," he says. "I'm creative all the time, looking for problems to solve, looking for challenges. We're in a world where out-of-the-box thinking and expertise seems to be dying, and there seems to be more and more demand. My entire being seems to involve change – but I'm more selective about the problems."

In his days at BT it was Cochrane's wackier exploits – like running an ant farm – that got press, as well as sayings like, "I hope to live long enough for my laptop to feel proud of me." Less well known is the fact that Cochrane grew up in a mining village in a house with three books; his is a story of hard work and determination.

Cochrane left BT in 2004, and now divides his time among four activities. First: he invests 50 per cent of everything he earns in start-up companies in such areas as DSL integration, location-based services to help protect isolated people at risk, and wireless sensors.

Second, he has a consultancy with his second wife (his first died in early 2004) with no employees; they assemble the team they need for each contract. Third, he does lectures. Fourth, he puts ten per cent of his time into universities. Anything for an unquiet life.

One of the curiosities of today's technology research is the confidence with which people seem to assume that the energy will be there to power whatever they want to build. Just as Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon.com have opened facilities in Oregon and Washingon nearer to energy sources, shortly before we spoke, Cochrane helped a company open a facility in Milton Keynes because London's Docklands no longer had sufficient energy available for its server farm. Milton Keynes was its nearest option.

"The interesting thing," he says, "is that in the world's server farms the utilisation of disks is six to eight per cent, so we have all these massive server and storage facilities. I think we can do a lot better." But energy is too obvious a worry, and Cochrane has a twist. "I think far more worrying than all of this is the fact that all of the raw materials that are actually endowing us to speak over the Internet and compute – metals, rare earths, and elements in the displays we're looking at – are going to run out in the next 30 to 100-years. Mostly, the next 30 to 35- years, with dire consequences."

When you can buy a perfectly good mouse for 23p and a 1TB hard drive for £130, "That's an unbelievable amount of kit for the money. If we continue to turn all the earth's raw materials into toys, sooner or later we're going to run out." The only sustainable future: "Start going towards organics for displays and computing. If we behave ourselves, the organic resources can be replaced." For the rest, "As an engineer, I feel that we have got to start being a little more conservative about the way we do things."

Nanotechnology seems to him like a promising avenue, even though it still takes energy. "The guys that terrify me are those that want to start messing around with the atmosphere – great big solar umbrellas. We do not have a clue." A percentage of his time, he says, is spent on solving problems of this kind, where he starts theoretically and moves into practical testing. "I've built my own laboratory," he says – which probably means that he bought and laid the bricks himself, since he personally built his own home.

"It's just a room, but there's a lot of kit and it's an absolute delight. I do real stuff, real engineering." At BT, he says, it wasn't really "politic" to do it, but "I always maintained an ability to do these things." µ