YEAR END ORIGINALS
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
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At year's end I did three reports, two for Intellectual Capital (see www.intellectualcapital.com ) and one for Teledotcom (see www.teledotcom.com (my report is here)).
Due to space limits and other stuff, not everything I wrote was used. That's all right: I recycled some of it.
Anyway, I am putting all three of them up here. For the moment the only people likely to find this page are subscribers (who have been told in email) and those diligent souls who really search out things here...) My purpose is two fold: to preserve what was left on the cutting room floor, and to show something of the editorial process. Understand: I am NOT complaining. In both cases the editors did an excellent job of fitting the tone and style to their publication, and in trimming what would probably not be of interest to their readers. Believe me, I am not shy of complaining when I think it is deserved; I did not complain about either of these editing jobs.
Let me URGE you: if you read these here, please go see the originals. I am skating at the edge of my contracts here, but if you read them at the original site no harm is done, and if this gets a few of you to go there when you wouldn't otherwise, it even does some good for my publishers.
The Communications Revolution.
Published by Teledotcom as Future Calling.
Jerry E. Pournelle, Ph.D. Jerry Pournelle Chaos Manor Senior Contributing Editor, BYTE.com Senior Columnist, Nikkei BYTE (Tokyo) Author, O'Reilly Books (Chaos Manor Guide to Hardware)
When the telephone first came out, a British official said it wouldn't have much impact on English business, because London had plenty of delivery boys on bicycles. The new communications revolution will have more impact than the telephone ever did, and it will happen faster.
Sometime in the future: you're in the supermarket checkout line, and decide to splurge on a bottle of Dom Perignon for a celebration. Just after the checker passes the bottle through the bar code reader, your pocket telephone rings.
It's your car. It has been talking to your house about your bank balance, and wants to warn you that this far exceeds your budget. "We're worried. You might not be able to make the mortgage payment. Or my payment. I'd hate that…"
That may be fanciful, but then again it may not be. Clearly one aspect of the future is that all our devices will be smart, and they will all talk to each other. Your car will natter with your toaster about your bank account, and possibly conspire with your kids about your Christmas present ("There's this nifty new GPS tracker with an inertial platform, just what I, oops, your mother, needs"). Your cell phone will know where you are, and your car will know where it is, and if you have forgotten where in this parking lot you have left the car, you can call it and it will tell you. "You are one hundred meters south south west of me…"
If you have left the car inside a parking structure it won't be able to see the GPS satellites, but that's where the inertial platform comes in. The car will still know where it is, and your telephone will know where you are. If all else fails you can call your car and tell it to honk twice.
If you forget where you are too often, your car and your telephone will discuss with your house whether you are developing Alzheimer's or this is just usual memory wear. They'll keep trying to help you out by reminding you of things you forgot to do, but they may also alert your family.
Most of that could be done today, except we can't afford it. However, a GPS receiver is already down below a hundred dollars, and that price is falling fast. All the hardware needed is subject to Moore's Law - everything gets twice as fast, for half the cost, every eighteen months. That "law" is a purely empirical observation, but it has described the microcomputer world for the past twenty years, and seems likely to go on doing so.
Moore's Law used to apply chiefly to computer chips, but the effect has spread to all electronics, and now precision machining is cheap and getting cheaper: enormous capacity disk drives cost very little now. The same technology will be used to make the inertial devices. All the hardware for communications is getting smaller, more powerful, and cheaper at exponential rates.
The software is a bit tougher. True artificial intelligence is a highly debatable matter, but the kind of smarts described above is merely a complex rules-based expert system. Plain language communication to and from computers requires many rules, but Peter Warren of Nice has reduced what's needed to a much smaller set of classes and objects plus a dictionary. A dozen companies are engaged in a mad race to find ways to make computers easier to use for the rest of us. They'll all succeed.
We can already talk to our computers. Computer language recognition is a bit crude, but at COMDEX this year both Dragon Systems and Lernout and Hauspie demonstrated speech recognition software far in advance of anything remotely available a couple of years ago. L&;H speech synthesis sounds pretty good, but not as good as Apple. Speech is the natural human interface tool, and we can expect to see our computers use it a lot more. Our machines will both talk and listen to us.
As the hardware gets better, complex programs become easier to write. Neural net systems, which learn much the way we do, were all the rage in the early days of small computers, but the excitement died out when we hit hardware limits. Now the hardware has leapt far ahead of software's ability to use it. Each iteration of the hardware-software cycle seems to take about five years, roughly two cycles of Moore's Law; so look for really dramatic improvements in computer communications and learning systems in about 2005, when neural net systems which learn from observation will come into their own.
What is it?
Today's high tech road warrior is loaded with equipment: a cell phone, a pager, a hand-held Personal Data Assistant (PDA) with wireless connectivity, a laptop computer, and a digital speech-recording device. The speech recorder can connect to the laptop to do automatic transcription of dictation. Many journalists also carry a good electronic camera that takes web-ready pictures. With the camera and the digital speech recorder you have an instant photo-journalism kit, and the computer can put the story with pictures on the wire from anywhere in the world.
Well, nearly anywhere in the world. There are a few places like Death Valley that don't have telephone cell relays, so unless you have a good satellite telephone, being wrecked in the desert leaves you on your own. With a good GPS system you can know to the nearest foot where you've been wrecked, but that doesn't help without communications. Maybe they'll be able to put telephone relays on the circling vultures.
Consolidation of road warrior devices has already begun. The laptop is becoming a handheld that contains a video camera and digital speech-recorder with transcription capability. The cell phone and pager have long been combined. Finding a form factor for combining handheld and telephone has been tricky. Some like a tiny device that looks like a hearing aid, contains a microphone, and connects wirelessly to the combination computer-phone-video camera-sound recorder. Add the GPS and inertial systems, and a 200 gigabyte storage device, and you've got a picture of the future. Everyone will have one or something like it.
A few weeks ago at a Reason Foundation formal dinner, whenever anyone took out a Palm Pilot to make a note, Pilots all over the room lit up as they detected each other and began automatically exchanging electronic business card. Some took home more than a dozen electronic greeting exchanges with speakers and other guests including talk show host Larry Elder. It was all automatic, and many of the people who exchanged electronic information including email address never actually spoke to each other. That trend will continue.
Everyone Is Connected
In 1978 I said "By the year 2000, everyone in Western Civilization will be able to get the answer to any question that actually has an answer." That seems to have happened, and there's been a vast expansion of what we can include in Western Civilization. This has some pretty hefty implications.
For one thing, it means all competition is global. All of it. Sure, if you just need a light bulb and some toothpaste you'll just run down to the corner store and get it, but if you need a dozen of them and you're not in a hurry, you can get them off the web. Soon you can subscribe to a light bulb and toothpaste delivery service: it keeps track of how often you need household items and delivers them automatically before you run out. Your local supermarket can set that service with data you already make available with your "Club" discount card.
There are already intelligent agents that will go out and look for bargains on the web, and they are improving fast. You give the agent rules - "buy me one at the best price under $xx, and only deal with people I've bought from before. If there's a really great bargain from a stranger, tell me before you order." Once again, that's not rocket science. We're doing that now on a limited basis. Now project that capability out a few years, and that's your competition, no matter what business you are in. All competition is global.
But if all competition is global, all successful enterprises must be world class. This is good news for consumers, but it can be disaster for sellers. Markups and margins are forced to the minimum, and there will be a great deal of competition for your attention. Employers are competing for the best workers against enterprises all over the world, just as every enterprise competes for customer attention. Over half the automobile sales in the US are made with some kind of web involvement, and that can only increase. As people get more in the habit of using the web we can expect even more sales that way. Whatever business you are in, you'd better be world class at it; your competition is the world.
IT'S WIRELESS
The magazine calls itself Wired, but the future is wireless. We have the technology. At your local end there's Bluetooth, a wireless technology that allows your computer to talk to your car keys and toaster. How it works isn't as important as that it or something like it is inevitable. Just as King Eric Bluetooth united the Scandinavian countries, Bluetooth technology will unite all our devices, making it possible for your car to discuss your bank balance with the house.
Everything else will be wireless, too. At the moment there's a shortage of global bandwidth, but that is largely because NASA has been something less than competent. We know how to build the satellites. Ten years ago Dr. Charles Gould of North American Rockwell spoke of the complexity inversion: as satellites become more complex, the equipment needed by the customer on the ground can be simpler.
We have for years known how to build those complex satellites. Satellite communications companies are going broke because of the cost of getting their hardware into orbit. Make orbital launch costs reasonable and we will develop the capability to do on-orbit assembly. Bandwidth requires power; power requires large satellites and big solar arrays. Big solar arrays need to be assembled in orbit. All of that depends on lower launch costs. This has all taken far longer than we would like, but breakthroughs in orbital costs are on the horizon. The communications revolution will create such an enormous market that if the United States can't do cheap launches, someone else will.
The future is wireless, not wired.
It's Digital
The future is digital, not analog. Wireless demands digital, even more so than wired access.
We will also need new protocols. At the moment the Internet works through a set of communications protocols called TCP/IP. This was adequate at first, but it has the fatal effect that it can't determine the quality of service provided, so you can't be billed by service quality. The result is that you can't prioritize transmissions, paying more to get critical messages sent quickly, while the newest baby photograph gets overnight service to Aunt Minnie. While we will always use more bandwidth than we have - demand rises to exceed supply - we are not efficiently using what we already have.
The ATM networks have already figured that out, and don't use TCP/IP. The changeover will be awkward, and relatively expensive. After all, the Internet actually consists of hundreds of basements full of routers sending TCP/IP packets to each other and from basement to basement. Those routers will have to be replaced with new ones that understand ATM or some other protocol set, and still make room for the older TCP/IP. At the moment the ATM chip sets are relatively expensive, but Moore's Law will take care of that. Actually much of that has already been done: the Sprint Ion Net does ATM now. It's those devices in the supermarkets, and your office, and your telephone, that don't understand it yet, and won't until the new ATM chips are cheaper. It's inevitable that they will be replaced. The only question is when.
The bottom line is that for once "good enough" (TCP/IP) was the enemy of "much better" (ATM) and a lot of Internet devices will have to be done over again. The good news is that companies like Cisco understand that very well. The technology is developing. The result will be much better Internet access for everyone, and you'll only have to pay for the quality of service that you need.
Bill Gates in "The Road Ahead" spoke of the "last mile" problem: there's high speed communications going on all over the country, but that last couple of hundred feet is very slow. He predicted that the solution would be gradual replacement of copper phone wires with fiber optics. It's now pretty clear we don't have to do that. First came ISDN, which is now being replaced with DSL, all running over the existing copper lines, all made possible by going digital rather than analog. That trend will continue. We'll never have all the bandwidth we want, but with existing copper we can have more than anyone dreamed of ten years ago.
The future is digital.
HEALTH MANAGEMENT
This morning's paper has a story about nursing homes, those terrifying warehouses where we store our aging relatives while hoping we'll never have the same fate. The communications revolution affects those, too. Cheap wireless communications will let Aunt Minnie send email without going through the home's switchboard. You may not much care for that now, but when you're in Aunt Minnie's place you'll be glad enough. Communications plus computing power may help keep you out of there, for that matter.
Not only can your car and your house chat with your relatives about whether you're getting Alzheimer's, but they can monitor your medications, keep you on a decent diet, notify emergency services if you're in trouble, and help overcome the normal memory attrition of aging. With the aid of good computers able to call for help without waiting to be asked, elderly people can remain independent years longer than they do now without the expense of 24 hour companion/assistants. Often such independence also means extended productivity. Elder writers can still write even if they can't always do the housekeeping.
Meanwhile, that little video camera on your handheld can recognize any face it has studied in a couple of seconds. Your pocket computer will know who you're talking to, even if this is a face in crowd. It will know when you last spoke with that person; and almost anything else you care to know. Big Jim Farley was a New York Tammany Hall politician whose success was partly due to the "Farleyfile": a collection of facts about everyone he ever met. If you went to see Big Jim, by the time you got into his office he knew your name, your birthday, the names of your spouse and children, and what you liked for lunch. It was all on file. Today's small computers can do that, plus recognizing the person so you don't need a secretary to do it for you.
Be Afraid
The technology for recognizing faces in a crowd from real-time video is already here: it won't be long before police have cameras scanning airports and bus stations; add the communications revolution and when you walk into the bank the camera can alert guards that you're a well known bank robber or confidence man. Since the system uses Bertillion measurements, growing a beard won't fool it, either.
The telephone companies already have the technology to intercept any telephone call anywhere in the United States without any additional hardware installation. There was a time that wiretaps required physical access to telephone lines either at the phone or in the exchange building. No longer. Now it's possible to access any telephone in the country from a computer on any desk in the country, and the Administration has repeatedly asked Congress for the authority to use that capability. They claim it will never be used without a court order, and you can believe as much of that as you want to.
The future is digital. Communications are already increasingly digital. Digital speech can be monitored by computers looking for key words; the CIA and FBI have long been rumored to be electronically eavesdropping on tens of thousands of telephone calls each week, with computers scanning for key words like "Hillary", "Explosives," "Clinton," "shoot the president," "bin Laden," "Bombs," and other such used close together. Whether they are doing that now or not, the capability to do it for a small number of conversations certainly exists - you probably have enough computing power in your home to monitor all the calls going into and out of your house for a hundred keywords - and machines can only get more powerful in future.
It is still possible to spoof these systems. Bin Laden's people deliberately used their cell phones, knowing the CIA/NRO satellites can hear cell phone conversations, and fooled the intelligence people and the President into believing a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant was owned by bin Laden and making nerve gas; after we destroyed it with cruise missile attacks it turns out neither of those facts is true. Some Libertarians in the US deliberately use all the provocative keywords they can think of in every phone call they make. Spoofing aside, electronic surveillance of communications systems gets better every month.
We each of us leave an enormous trail of machine readable information: credit card purchases, those supermarket "club" cards, access to bank systems: everywhere you go you leave an information trail behind.
One answer to the commercial information trail is through anonymized browsing through proxies, which you can get from outfits like Anonymizer.com, but that doesn't solve the real problem. Another is encryption, not the baby variety that web companies use to take your credit card information, but real encryption at the source, using hardware designed to make it routine and invisible. This is already possible: and in Britain the government is already seriously considering legislation making it a felony offence to send encrypted messages unless you deposit your encryption key with the government. The US Administration has already asked the Congress for much the same thing.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Summing Up
It is now 2000, and anyone in Western Civilization can get the answer to any question that has an answer. This is the information revolution. The effects are usually beneficial, but it's not entirely benign: one of the questions you can get the answer to in about ten minutes is how to make nitro-glycerin out of easily obtained materials and do it without blowing yourself up - and if you really want to scare yourself silly, do ten minutes research on nerve gasses.
The communications revolution will have equally profound effects on our lives, mostly beneficial, but there will be real problems too. Lack of space keeps me from going into detail: I could write for an hour on privacy issues alone.
The important points to remember are:
- Everyone will be connected.
- The future is wireless.
- The future is digital.
- All our devices will be connected and they will all be smart.
- All competition will potentially be global.
- The communications revolution will be as profound as the computer revolution, with both dangers and opportunities.
And that's only the beginning.
-30-
NOTE: The published version has material that is not in this: it was inserted (by me) in last minute editing, including another fanciful story of communications changing the life of a tribal herder outside Umtata. DO SEE THE PUBLISHED VERSION.
The Treasons of the Clerks
by Jerry Pournelle
Asked to name the most important event of the century, my first temptation was to look to technology. The first Industrial Revolution was based on big centralized power sources. This century saw a second Industrial Revolution built around devices like the quarter-inch drill: small, portable, high-energy devices that allowed the decentralization of production. No sooner was that underway before we had another Industrial Revolution built around robotics. Then came the computer and the Information Revolution that has only just begun. All four have had profound effects on everything we do.
Then there is medicine: This century saw sulfa drugs and penicillin, the most radical expansion in medical capability since the discovery of the germ theory of disease, and in a sense the first real cures doctors ever had. (Prior to this century's antibiotics the most physicians could do was facilitate healing rather than eradicate disease.)
And, of course, many science-fiction writers believe the discovery of nuclear energy so important that they dated their future stories in the Atomic, rather than the Christian, Era.
The birth of the anti-religious order
These all are important events. I think, however, that the most important event of the century is only marginally connected with technology. I refer to it as the treason of the clerks -- the abandonment of Western civilization by the intellectual class and intellectual institutions. For good or ill, the West must face a future in which every individual has enormously increased power for good or ill without any coherent support from the intellectuals: from those supposed to be our intellectual betters, the best and the brightest among us.
Not only have the intellectuals completed Nietzche's murder of God, but they exchanged the God of Jacob and Jesus for a false god that failed. Even after the agnostic God of Marx proved false, the intellectuals remained more sympathetic to Marx, Lenin, even Stalin, than to Jehovah. They remain so still. It is far less embarrassing on the modern university campus to confess residual sympathy for communism than for Christianity.
It is indeed the end of the Christian Era, not because the discovery of atomic energy is so important, but because Christianity has become intellectually so unimportant. It has all but vanished from our public affairs; indeed, our public institutions actively conduct war on any public signs of religion.
Today when we face profound questions of morality, our television announcers turn to "ethicists," intellectuals of no discernable qualification beyond being presented on the evening news as moral and ethical authorities. More often than not, it seems that they draw their pronouncements from thin air rather than from any religious source. What else would you expect in today's anti-religious order?
No higher power
When I was a young man, it would have been inconceivable that a major civic event -- an inauguration, a ground-breaking for a new civic building, a parade, launching a warship, graduation from public institutions -- could take place without the participation of clergy. Smaller events might make do with a single protestant minister, but larger ones required both a minister and a Roman priest, and really important events brought in a rabbi as well. The event would open with an invocation and close with a blessing. The effect was to show that the civic elders believed in a Power higher than themselves.
Today the very suggestion that we as a nation owe any kind of thanks to Divine Providence provokes lawsuits. While the majority of the populace still wishes for the old rituals, intellectual leaders have persuaded the people that this is improper, and what was common for the first two centuries of the republic was, in fact, forbidden by its Founders.
Whitaker Chambers went to Columbia University a "Coolidge Republican." It did not take long for his intellectual leaders there to laugh at him, to scorn, to convince him that his theistic beliefs were contemptible. Like many of his generation, Chambers did not merely abandon religion. He persuaded himself that Western civilization pointed unerringly to Stalin. Much the same thing happened to me as an undergraduate. If you were to be in tune with history, you moved to the left, at least as far as anti-anti-communism. One might not be a communist, but surely it was contemptible to oppose those who were.
That attitude prevails today. Anyone applying for an academic position would do better to admit having held fast to Stalinism right up to the collapse of the USSR than to have been a Cold Warrior.
The disappearance of the Western Canon
Religion has not been the only casualty. Everyone knows that the entire canon of what we once thought were the essential works is gone. When I was in eighth grade everyone in Tennessee read (or had already read in a previous grade) Hiawatha, Paul Revere's Ride, The Skeleton in Armor, The Lady of the Lake, Treasure Island, The King of the Golden River, Evangeline A Story of Acadia, and a dozen other such works. By the time high school was finished we had encountered a large sample of the treasures of Western civilization -- and in doing that we had come to at least a partial understanding of what was, and was not considered proper behavior. We had a common language with which to discuss vice and virtue.
No more. There is no canon of respected works. The idea has fallen into contempt. Real intellectuals, we now understand, are above all that, above and beyond mere "texts."
For better or worse, Western civilization was religiously based, specifically Christian or, if you like, Judeo-Christian, because the ethical considerations are reasonably equal and somewhat different from the Graeco-Roman traditions.
No self-styled intellectual now defends Judeo-Christian society and, in fact, the intellectual leadership of Europe and America is the declared and steadfast enemy of what used to be the basis of Western civilization. Most of them went over to the communists, and when some abandoned the left to become neo-conservatives they did not bring with them any real basis for a social order. Indeed, many of them, and all the rest of the intellectuals, purport to have great respect for the intellectual class that went over to the communists, made anti-anti-communism a sine qua non for being an intellectual, and pathetically clung to Gorbachev long after even Russia had given up.
A Godless world?
We now have greed and money and power on the one hand, hatred of the bourgeois and the power of money on the other, and damned little in between; we no longer have a moral basis for a society in so far as you could find that among the intellectual class. When we have moral questions we go to "ethicists" as if they had any basis for their pronouncements.
There remain some Christian intellectuals, but they are not admitted to the ranks of the anointed on campuses. The universities are, except in the sciences, dominated by the left who have an aimless hatred of wealth (or an excessive envy and greed for it), continue to believe you cannot be an intellectual unless you are an anti-anti-communist, and have no well spring for their "ethics" or justice. They have turned the "best Shakespearian theatre in the world" into a place where Cordelia is mute and speaks in sign language; in which the intentions of the authors mean nothing; in which not even deconstruction is taken seriously because nothing is taken seriously. To get tenure in "liberal arts" or "social sciences" you must profess to believe nonsense such as the "fact" that Dow-Corning was guilty in the silicone-implant business, the Earth is in the balance and global warming cannot even be questioned, and a myriad of other junk science.
Thus, we face a world where unprecedented economic and technical power is devolved to lower and lower levels of the social order with no intellectual leadership class, no consensus on what society or even humanity is for, and no one to set examples for us.
We may find our way out of all this. Technology gives us the means to communicate with each other directly, without mediation from the clerks. It may even be that we do not need the intellectual class.
Let us hope so, because the intellectuals climbed aboard the flywheel of history and marched into the machine; now that the Marxist dream has betrayed them, they have no God to replace the God that failed. And that is the most significant event of the century.
- 30 -
PREDICTING THE YEAR 2000
Jerry Pournelle
Intellectual Capital January 4, 2000
More years ago than I care to remember I assisted Rod Whitaker in putting on his Masters Thesis production of a play he had written about the end of the world. It was called "Eve of the Bursting" and it took place the night of December 31, 999 AD when everyone expected things to come apart. In the play, shortly after midnight a squad of soldiers returns and their sergeant announces "Attention! Attention! I have come to tell you the world did not end after all. Long live the Army!"
In charity I have erased the flood of hate mail accusing me of irresponsibility and worse for saying here months ago that the world wasn't going to end December 31, 1999. Unfortunately, since it didn't come to an end, I'm still here to do the traditional column predicting what's going to happen next year.
The problem with divining the future is that while trends aren't hard to see, their strengths are. Probably the most important question everyone has is, will the long boom continue? Forget the short term downswings, what's the real trend? Will the Dow be at 20,000 in a year? And what in the world does a sometime Cold Warrior and writer know about it anyway? On that latter score, I recall saying after the last crash that the market would be back up, and pretty soon. My colleagues said, "Well maybe it will stabilize at 2,000, but it will never get a lot higher." And laughed like hell when I said there was no reason for it to stop at 5,000. I have to add that I never suspected that it would get to 10,000, or that a dozen mutual funds would manage 100% growth in a year.
Still, the trend is up, due to increased productivity; and there's the first countertrend. Our schools remain wretched, so that training new workers is up to their employers; no one expects students to graduate from public high school able to do anything useful. There's a sense in which that's all to the good: it's hard to imagine the schools will get worse, and here and there you see indications that some places have had enough, and are insisting on getting something for the enormous sums poured into the public school system. Even if the Teachers Unions defeat those trends, home schooling and private schools are taking up some of the slack.
That's important, because the Communications Revolution is going to be with us from now on. Increasingly everyone can communicate with everyone else: which means that everyone competes with everyone else. From now on, with few exceptions, all competition is global: you will literally have to be world class to be competitive as Internet commerce continues its inevitable march. Expect to see more of that, starting this year and continuing forever, or at least until the end of civilization as we know it.
There are many countertrends which might squash the long boom like a bug. The first is the serious state of public education: there's nothing inevitable about the few flickering signs that things are getting better. The teachers are digging in like the French on the Marne. Vouchers, charter schools, home schooling, private schools, anything that threatens the Soviet style monopoly of graduates of Departments of Education, are targets for action by the most powerful political lobbying organization in the nation. NASA, the Soviet system of agriculture, and American public education are all organized in much the same way, and all have much the same result: a few examples of excellence, and a long record of absorbing vast resources while producing mediocre results. In a world in which all competition must be world-class, an inferior education system is a primary hamper. The effect on the long boom should be obvious.
Another countertrend surfaced just after the first of the year: OSHA now says it will hold employers accountable for working conditions in the homes of workers who work at home. That will put a stop to one of the trends toward increased productivity: workers in transit between home and job produce nothing, and the trip itself is often exhausting enough to lower work efficiency. Add in the resources wasted in transportation, and note that much of our offshore competition has neither OSHA nor legal feeding frenzies to contend with, and we see an example of another competitive disadvantage. There will be more. The purpose of government is to hire and pay government employees; fortunately no one including our competitors is exempt from this iron rule, so every productive worker, here and abroad, has to carry a share of bureaucrats. Alas, I am not at all sure that ours aren't more creative in finding ways to hamper productivity.
In other words, looking into the future of our economic health involves studying conflicting trends and trying to make sense of them. Will Moore's Law - computing power doubles while computing costs drop every eighteen months - continue, and is that enough to outstrip the ingenuity of OSHA and ADA and all the other bureaucratic primary hampers? I fear I can only raise the question. Moore's law dictates that productivity will increase. You'll have to decide for yourself whether we'll have enough parasite control to get any benefit from that.
Details
General trends are hard to predict because they depend on the outcome of political and social battles.
Specific technology trends are easier to see because most are inevitable.
First, it's clear that this will be the year of the hand-held computer, and it's fairly easy to say that the dominant player in that trend won't be Microsoft. Years ago US Robotics, a major innovator in modem communications, came out with the Palm devices: Personal Data Assistants (PDA) employing the Palm Operating System. The Palm Pilot systems now enjoy more than 70% market share in an industry growing faster than the desktop computer business. When 3COM, which bought US Robotics a few years ago, spins off the Palm Systems as a separate company next month, it will be one of the hottest Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) since Microsoft. If you can get in on that, do so.
The Palm Pilot people developed their own wireless communications system and put it in the Palm VII, but they wisely continued to work with others: one of the major competitors to the PALM VII is OmniSky's wireless modem for the Palm V. Unlike the Palm VII which charges for communications by use, the OmniSky model is flat rate like your Internet access. From the earliest days of the Internet flat rate has always won out over pay for use, and there is no reason to suppose that trend won't continue. Look to see the PALM VII go over to flat rate before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is putting an enormous effort into Windows CE. Gates cottoned onto the Internet quite late, really not until the Netscape people began to tell the world they were going to use the Internet to destroy Microsoft; but despite Netscape's enormous head start, Microsoft caught up and raced so far ahead the company is charged with being a monopoly in a field they weren't even in when the decade began.
In other words, never underestimate Microsoft. Going head to head with Bill Gates is usually a losing proposition. Moreover, Windows CE has the potential to bring in such things as tiny video cameras that double as text scanners, and sound recorders that become speech to text generators, all in hand held devices. Certainly someone will develop that market, which has a huge potential.
As I've repeatedly said, the future is wireless and digital, and those trends have implications for everything we do. Add Moore's law and you see, if dimly, where we are going: huge storage capacity, huge computing power, all at low cost in something you can put in your pocket. Cameras, sound recorders, data bases, all portable, all cheap, all wireless, all smart, and all talking to each other. Where will that take us?
HEALTH MANAGEMENT
This morning's paper has a story about nursing homes, those terrifying warehouses where we store our aging relatives while hoping we'll never have the same fate. The communications revolution affects those, too. Cheap wireless communications will let Aunt Minnie send email without going through the home's switchboard. You may not much care for that now, but when you're in Aunt Minnie's place you'll be glad enough. Communications plus computing power may help keep you out of there, for that matter.
Not only can your car and your house chat with your relatives about whether you're getting Alzheimer's, but they can monitor your medications, keep you on a decent diet, notify emergency services if you're in trouble, and help overcome the normal memory attrition of aging. With the aid of good computers able to call for help without waiting to be asked, elderly people can remain independent years longer than they do now without the expense of 24 hour companion/assistants. Often such independence also means extended productivity. Elderly writers can still write even if they can't always do the housekeeping. With a GPS built into my Palm Pilot I can't even get lost.
Meanwhile, that little video camera on your handheld can recognize any face it has studied in a couple of seconds. Your pocket computer will know who you're talking to, even if this is a face in crowd. It will know when you last spoke with that person; and almost anything else you care to know. Big Jim Farley was a New York Tammany Hall politician whose success was partly due to the "Farleyfile": a collection of facts about everyone he ever met. If you went to see Big Jim, by the time you got into his office he knew your name, your birthday, the names of your spouse and children, and what you liked for lunch. It was all on file. Today's small computers can do that, plus recognizing the person so you don't need a secretary to do it for you. If you've forgotten who someone is, but your PDA knows and will tell you, have you really forgotten?
Be Afraid
The technology for recognizing faces in a crowd from real-time video is already here: it won't be long before police have cameras scanning airports and bus stations;. Add the communications revolution and when you walk into the bank the camera can alert guards that you're a well known bank robber or confidence man. Since the system uses Bertillion measurements, growing a beard won't fool it, either.
The telephone companies already have the technology to intercept any telephone call anywhere in the United States without any additional hardware installation. There was a time that wiretaps required physical access to telephone lines either at the phone or in the exchange building. No longer. Now it's possible to access any telephone in the country from a computer on any desk in the country, and the current Administration has repeatedly asked Congress for the authority to use that capability. They claim it will never be used without a court order, and you can believe as much of that as you want to.
The future is digital. Communications are already increasingly digital. Digital speech can be monitored by computers looking for key words; the CIA and FBI have long been rumored to be electronically eavesdropping on tens of thousands of telephone calls each week, with computers scanning for key words like "Hillary", "Explosives," "Clinton," "shoot the president," "bin Laden," "Bombs," and other such used close together. Whether they are doing that now or not, the capability to do it for a small number of conversations certainly exists - you probably have enough computing power in your home to monitor all the calls going into and out of your house for a hundred keywords - and machines can only get more powerful in future.
It is still possible to spoof these systems. Bin Laden's people deliberately used their cell phones, knowing the CIA/NRO satellites can hear cell phone conversations, and fooled the intelligence people and the President into believing a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant was owned by bin Laden and making nerve gas; after we destroyed it with cruise missile attacks it turns out neither of those facts was true. Some Libertarians in the US deliberately use all the provocative keywords they can think of in every phone call they make. Spoofing aside, electronic surveillance of communications systems gets better every month.
We each of us leave an enormous trail of machine readable information: credit card purchases, those supermarket "club" cards, access to bank systems: everywhere you go you leave an information trail behind.
One answer to the commercial information trail is through anonymized browsing through proxies, which you can get from outfits like Anonymizer.com, but that doesn't solve the real problem. Another is encryption, not the baby variety that web companies use to take your credit card information, but real encryption at the source, using hardware designed to make it routine and invisible. This is already possible: and in Britain the government is already seriously considering legislation making it a felony offence to send encrypted messages unless you deposit your encryption key with the government. The US Administration has already asked the Congress for much the same power.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Putting it all Together
Not all this happens this year, but more will happen this year than most of us think. Moore's Law is an exponential, and we are coming to the steep part now. Technology races ahead, giving us vast potential for increasing productivity. Government, meanwhile, tries to stuff the genie back in the bottle, and works against most of the trends to freedom that technology opens. As fast as we develop methods that let us work at home, outfits like OSHA try to make them irrelevant.
This will continue: and on the outcome of that struggle will depend whether the Dow stands at 20,000 next December, or hovers around 10. If I had to bet, I'd go with technology.
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