#humanlatency
Though you may have fully gorged yourself on tales of latency over the past few years, I’m here to tell you that that overall story is far from over. Reason being, there is more than one form of latency – and the value (or cost – depending on your perspective) of at least one of the other types of latency will make the first narrative – the super-sexy knocking-on-the-door-of-the-speed-of-light version – seem like the Leda moon orbiting Jupiter. This is where human latency enters the vernacular. From where I sit – and though the nuances can be hotly debated beyond this short essay - there are actually three primary forms of latency - and a couple hybrid versions of those. These primary forms include “network / proximity latency”, “compute latency”, and “collaboration latency”. (Of course, the technology arms race of the past decade dealt almost exclusively with minimizing network / proximity latency.) Each of these general forms is a mix of native technical and human latencies, as follows (see Exhibit 1): With this rudimentary [...]
