DISCUSSIONS AT JEFFERSON'S TABLE
MONTICELLO
30 APRIL 1996
JAMES MARTIN: We are moving to a time when we are going to have very high bandwidth into the home, whether through cable modems or ISDN or optical fibers. We are going to get the capability to have the Internet delivering television into the home. That will presumably become worldwide, and the Internet already is tying the whole world together in a quite extraordinary way. Now, what are the social effects of this going to be?
SEYMOUR CRAY: Well, I hope it breaks down our nationalistic spirits, because it seems to me our standard of living has reached the point where we ought to be able to spend a little time thinking about others. And I think this is the vehicle. I think this will do it.
First, there is communication, and after that will come transportation. We will be able to bring our bodies together as well as our spirits. So that's my hope.
JAMES MARTIN: The whole world is being tied together by the Internet. I have been around the world twice in the last six months or so. You go to Third World countries, and the first question you get is, "What is your Internet address?" And then I get to the British government, and the first question is, "What is the Internet?"
(Laughter.)
JAMES MARTIN: In the Pacific Rim, with all the activity going on there, you get the feeling America is the old country. Things are changing here much more slowly than in the Pacific North.
So instead of America being the melting pot, the world is the melting pot, and the world is going to get optical fibers, ATM, MPEG into the home, and so on. What are the social consequences of this?
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: I think they are enormous. In fact, I think we've already seen some of them. No small part of the reason for the decline of the Soviet Union was the inability to keep information out.
JAMES MARTIN: What do you think is going to happen in China? China seems to me to be a totally unmanageable country at the moment, especially when Hong Kong becomes part of China. Is it going to fly apart like a flywheel?
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: No, I don't think so. China has a multimillennium history of absorbing. I was there in November, and a great interest among the telecommunications and government people I talked to is, "How quickly can we get Internet and get connected and become a part of the community?" They weren't trying to find a way to fight it.
JAMES MARTIN: But all over the world you get the feeling there is an Internet 10 percent phenomenon, or less than 10 percent. In America there are only 10 percent who are going to be able to use the resources.
GORDON BELL: Over what period of time?
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: No, I think that's not true with 10 percent. Well, in Scandinavia right now, the connection rates are up into the 20 percent range already.
JAMES MARTIN: It's not the connection rate, it's whether people can cope with the human factor and find their way through the facilities, and will they do that?
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: The Internet today is the black-and-white television of 1951. We're going to make it a lot easier. The barrier height to making use of the Internet today is enormous, but that will not be a static interface. That will change dramatically over the next several years.
DAVID ALLISON: Do you think the Internet is going to carry not only information but also a way of thinking, a set of values? Is it going to be a way to promote democratic society worldwide, or is it value-neutral?
JAY FORRESTER: Or is it in fact a highly disruptive force that will produce disenchantment, frustration, and possibly therefore cause a reversion to authoritarian governments to try to counter the chaos? Look at the possibilities now in the former Soviet Union. It may go back to an authoritarian system just because of the chaos.
JAMES MARTIN: I think the Soviet Union is an interesting example. If it did go back to communism, I don't think it could ever be the same communism; because now it will be almost impossible to stop the public from accessing information sources beyond the borders. And once you go beyond the borders, you've got the whole world.
GORDON BELL: Well, it might act like a diode, I mean, a diode for certain ideas. You can accommodate what's coming from the world, but you don't have to adopt that in the political structure. You can have a totalitarian government -- all these free ideas that flow in don't have to be part of how you operate internally.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But, Gordon, to do that you have to have the ability to control the flows.
JAMES MARTIN: Totalitarian governments of the past were dependent upon gross misinformation. Can we have a totalitarian government in the future which has gross misinformation? I doubt it, because people are going to find out the reality. They are going to, in some way.
BOB METCALFE: But that's on the assumption that in fact people will be allowed to have access to the Internet, and that's a big assumption.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But it doesn't really have to be the Internet. I mean, it can be something at a far lower level of technology. Fax machines and directed E-mail, as opposed to global E-mail, were what permeated the Iron Curtain. It wasn't the Internet en masse that did it. So other forms of the technologies that all of us have been involved in creating can work.
DAVID ALLISON: But shouldn't people like you take more responsibility for making sure that the use of this technology is moving the world in a direction that it should be moving, towards greater freedom?
JAMES MARTIN: That's a very complicated question, because it immediately brings up the subject of censorship. One looks at today's movies, and there are things which are incredibly damaging to society in today's movies. Should we censor that sort of nonsense? Is it possible to censor? Are we going to tolerate an extreme distortion of the leadership figures in society by Hollywood? This is a very difficult question.
BOB METCALFE: Well, it's very similar to the distortion by everyone. You go start clicking the home pages of government agencies, and you can see it's a wonderful new propaganda machine. If you go to senate.gov and whitehouse.gov I assure you that you don't find journalistic truth there. You find propaganda. You see the picture of an official, often it even resembles Stalin, and then you see the propaganda of the agency and what a great job it's doing for us. I mean, everyone's capable of propaganda, not just Hollywood.
GORDON BELL: If you built this infrastructure and were able to use it, you might be able to control it in a very small country like Singapore, whose population is only 3 or 4 million people.
JAMES MARTIN: I think we do have the capability to create cryptography that is uncrackable except by very, very special people. Is that right?
SEYMOUR CRAY: I think you could drop the last part of that sentence, and it would still be true. We're going to have cryptography that no one will break.
GORDON MOORE: Well, it's clearly possible to establish cryptography that we can explain, but that's another thing that's regulated by the government. If not the U.S. Government, it's the French or somebody else. Nobody seems to want strong cryptography available.
SEYMOUR CRAY: But I don't think that our governments are going to be able to control it.
GORDON BELL: They can't control it. If I send a message to Seymour, I mean, we could agree on the scheme.
SEYMOUR CRAY: Well, they can put us in jail, but if enough of us do it, the jails won't hold us all.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: It goes back to how can you have a diode in an environment where you're going to flow electricity wherever it moves.
BOB METCALFE: There's a very interesting thing I hear recently, which is that we all have a moral responsibility to send all of our communications encrypted, so that the people who have a reason to send it encrypted won't stand out so much.
(Laughter.)
DAVID ALLISON: If any of you could construct the world of the future with your magic wand, what would it look like with respect to information technology?
SEYMOUR CRAY: It should have a challenge that's now missing. I think we're really short of challenges.
I would rather have it be a physical challenge than an alien species challenge, for example, although that would be nice, too. But I think having humanity, we need challenges as human beings, clearly. If we don't find one we'll fight with each other to make a challenge. And if we could have physical challenge or an external challenge where we would all share the same concerns, it would rapidly accelerate change.
JAMES MARTIN: What could that challenge be? If we wanted to create a challenge for mankind, what could it be?
SEYMOUR CRAY: Well, a meteor, for example. You know how serious a meteor in the Atlantic Ocean would be. If we knew it were coming, we might know 10 years ahead -- I mean, God might take care of this.
(Laughter.)
It's his job.
(Laughter.)
After all, as the great architect in the world, if you believe in that particular architecture.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: Aren't you talking about frontiers? But one of the wonderful things about cyberspace is that the frontiers continue.
GORDON BELL: Well, no. The frontiers are not the same. We are not threatened that much.
JAY FORRESTER: Well, we've not run out of frontiers. We have the frontiers of understanding our social and economic systems, which are the source of our major difficulties and which have not been understood.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But they don't threaten us.
JAY FORRESTER: Well, but they do threaten us. That's where the problems come from.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But Seymour, frontiers don't have to threaten. They can also provide new promise, an opportunity to go make something happen. And I think cyberspace provides that.
SEYMOUR CRAY: That's different. I think human nature requires a threat to bring people together.
GORDON MOORE: It takes that to really get the juices flowing.
JAY FORRESTER: Well, there is the threat of AIDS, of population growth, of running out of water.
GORDON MOORE: It doesn't get the juices flowing.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But it's also the opportunity to make something new happen, to go learn something new, to change a boundary of what we understand. Both carrots and sticks are important motivators.
GORDON BELL: That's the entrepreneurial reward system. What's interesting about the Internet is that it totally flattens the earth -- the Indian programmer is just as good, and more methodical than the American programmer. Bits can flow anywhere. To the people who are skilled and have an educational level, it really brings things into balance very rapidly.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: It makes a small company every bit as present as the large companies that a number of us are part of. It shifts the economies of size, because it's hard to tell the difference between a Microsoft and a start-up company on the Internet. And that's a new frontier in and of itself.
JAY FORRESTER: I have a former student from India who now runs a company with programmers in India. He has a direct satellite link from India to his offices in Kendall Square, and direct access into General Electric's operating systems. And his people in India directly modify General Electric's operating system.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: Wonderful. So why is this a problem?
GORDON BELL: It's not. It's a new form of economics.
Oh, by the way, I discovered today Jefferson established the idea it's all right to go in debt.
(Laughter.)
That's why he fathered a Democratic Party.
(Laughter.)
It's no joke, we're OK. We're in good company. We just turned it into a high art.
JAMES MARTIN: I think there is another aspect of this equalization. In America, and over and over again in the rest of the world, you can see good ideas which never turn into profit. Europe is full of this, the rest of the world is full of it.
As I get around some of the foreign universities, they occasionally show me things that are mind-blowing. If that was in Silicon Valley that would be the start of a billion-dollar company. But being here in this little university, it will never see the light of day, because nobody there has ever thought about it.
GORDON BELL: But it isn't just Silicon Valley. I think Chinese are the ultimate entrepreneurs. Even today, it's not the WASPS that are coming up with the idea today, it's the Asians. I'm against immigration laws.
GORDON MOORE: That's the right way to look at it. For the last 20 years at least half the technical people we've been hiring in Silicon Valley have been foreign born, U.S. university-educated, and now they are at the point where they are setting up companies. They are part of the American infrastructure. It's not because they are Indians, it's because they are part of the infrastructure, and they are participating in it.
JAMES MARTIN: Most of the good ideas which are springing up randomly all over the world are lost. But the ones in America get translated into business. So one of the great effects of the Internet will be to say, "Let's capture the great ideas springing up anywhere and bring them into the American capability."
GORDON BELL: It's a capital issue. No, it's capital and risk and the need for the time to make these things go.
But I worry about in this the physical versus the electronic-- the atoms versus the bits. A country needs to manufacture as well as develop new ideas.
JAMES MARTIN: The hard stuff doesn't go offshore. The intellect-intensive stuff stays here. No other country in the world could design a Pentium Pro chip, no other country in the world could build a Boeing 777, no other country in the world could make a movie like "Jurassic Park". This is because those things are intellect- intensive, needing extreme integration.
JAY FORRESTER: Well, you may be looking at a very transient situation. I mean, other countries will relatively soon be able to do all those things.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: I don't think it's a question of technology, I think it's a question of being willing to take a risk and go do something. It is either admired or decried, and in most Asian cultures it is decried. This gets to Gordon's point earlier -- a lot of the people who want to take risks stay here, instead of being shunned within their own cultures.
DAVID ALLISON: We convened this seminar to talk about Jeffersonian values, but we're talking about entrepreneurial values.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But David, believe me, the entrepreneur is today's yeoman farmer. It's not farming the land, it's farming the ideas. It's going and taking the risks.
JAMES MARTIN: If you take all of Jefferson's great statements about equality and enobling the mind of man, and if you apply those to cyberspace, it seems to me there is an amazing match between Jefferson and cyberspace. His ideas still make sense, and they look like a great creed for the next 50 years.
ROBERT METCALFE: Well, 10 at least.
(Laughter.)
DAVID ALLISON: Do you think the education system is teaching people to be the kind of entrepreneurs that we're talking about here?
JAMES MARTIN: The problem with the education system in America is that the graduate education is the best in the world, but the education for ordinary people is pretty poor. So it's education for the cyberspace 10 percent. The bottom 50 percent is becoming unemployable because of the education system.
SEYMOUR CRAY: But don't you think that's going to change rapidly now with what we're doing in classrooms? In Minneapolis, I have the feeling that in just a few years children in third and fourth grade will be connected to the Internet in their classroom. Don't you believe that?
JAMES MARTIN: Jay, you believe something much more than that, don't you?
JAY FORRESTER: Well, we're speaking of the lower 50 percent in education. Our observation is that there is no correlation at all between students who have been ranked as high in the educational system or low and how well they will do when it comes to understanding complex systems.
The ones at the bottom are apt to be at the bottom only because they see the education as irrelevant. They see it as not applying to them. They are uninterested in it. As soon as they latch onto something that really is exciting and relevant and fits their lives, they come right up to the top. You will find that some people who are the top of the old system, the present system, got there because they could simply remember facts and they can feed them back, but they don't necessarily understand what they mean. There is simply is no correlation between the classical definition of good and poor students and what they will do in the kind of education that we've been developing.
JAMES MARTIN: Jay, are you saying that if you applied your technology to the K through 12 you could deal with the problem of the 10 percent versus the rest? Could you educate the bottom 50 percent with the technology?
JAY FORRESTER: Well, what is the bottom 50 percent? I'd say the bottom 50 percent have just as many fully competent people as the top 50 percent. There is no correlation between that traditional definition of top and bottom and the real capability of people.
JAMES MARTIN: If this group were to put together a manifesto with some Jeffersonian statements about what could increase the probability of good and decrease the probability of bad, would one of the very important things in that manifesto be that we should use technology like your technology for educating everybody?
JAY FORRESTER: Well, of course, I have a self-serving interest in this, but Jefferson's position in history was at a point where the frontier of the new geographical exploration was coming to an end, and the forefront of the opening up of the frontier of science and technology.
We are today, I think, at the closing of the frontier of science and technology and opening the frontier to the understanding of our social, political and economic systems.
When I say the closing of the technology frontier, what I mean is it's not going to stop, what I mean is it's a production line. It is routine. We know how to do it, it's not a frontier, it is an automatic process. The thing that we really didn't understand in the past, which is now waking up, is the ability to understand our social and economic systems in a way that allows us to deal with them.
JAMES MARTIN: It sure hasn't felt automatic for the last 20 years.
(Laughter.)
GORDON MOORE: There's a theme that comes out of the early background of many of us, which links to what Jay's doing in the educational system. That relates to building systems. He's giving people the ability to build systems.
I started playing in my father's shop and building and fixing things and designing stuff, and if you look at it, a number of us had similar backgrounds.
JAY FORRESTER: There are things about complex systems that the public generally has no conception of. Simple systems have direct cause and effect. Complex systems do not. But then to make matters even more insidious, complex systems seem to present to you what you're expecting: something seems to be a cause that in fact is only a coincident symptom. They fool you.
Think about this related to policy. I would say 98 percent of the policies in a system have almost no leverage for producing change. That is, 98 percent of the things that all corporate, government, and public debates are focused on do not matter at all. When you find somebody that has his hands on one of the really "high leverage policies," the odds are that another person is pushing that policy in an opposite direction just as strongly.
JAMES MARTIN: If we were stating a Jeffersonian manifesto for the future, shouldn't part of it be that we must reduce that transition time between concept and implementation? This really means that we need to get education on things you're talking about to a large number of people very quickly.
JAY FORRESTER: We had earlier in the afternoon a discussion of how the universities would lead the field in research. But on the whole universities are the most conservative of our institutions, and my strategy is to squeeze the university between the incoming freshmen who want new subjects and the corporations who want people who can handle new jobs.
I've been through this before. When I started the computer work, professors in our mathematics department told their graduate students: "Don't go study with him under the threat of your future careers. You cannot pay any attention to any computers if you want to have a future career." It was all done from the periphery and pushed on.
JAMES MARTIN: Seymour, can biologists replace silicon with carbon?
SEYMOUR CRAY: Oh, I think that when we tire of making smaller and smaller silicon because it's too challenging to make worthwhile progress, which is 10 years from now -- Gordon said 10 years -- then we're going to find, number one, we're working with dimensions that are biologically sized -- I mean, 10 to 50 nanometers, that's not far down -- and we're going to find two things.
We're going to come face to face with the uncertainty principle because things are small, and face to face with life forces, because they are there. And when all that happens we're going to find the biologists in these 10 years are going to do incredible and frightening things with what they are already tinkering. They are going to make both biological monsters and nonbiological monsters for us. And so we're going to have to live with those things.
But some good will come out of it because we're going to find that we can do pattern recognition and so, I think, come together somewhere between 10 and 15 years from now. That's my notion.
Let's look at it another way. In 10 years we're going to have nearly everyone on the earth programming, and this isn't a good solution. Now, if you get machines that think, programmers will be out of a job, because things will learn, machines will learn. That will be truly a revolution, won't it?
Ten years ago we thought we could write a program where machines could learn, but not very much is happening with it.
JAMES MARTIN: The frightening thing is once machines start to learn, they will learn with electronic speed.
GORDON MOORE: Here's a little more extreme view. I had the privilege of listening to Stephen Hawking. His view is that the evolution of mankind is going through a dramatic change, that the ability to collect the accumulated knowledge of history is really a change in the rate of evolution. Humans today may not be biologically different than they were 10,000 years ago, but from the point of view of what we know, it's a lot higher. And he extrapolates that into self-reproducing machines as being not too far down the road, that humans are essentially obsolete.
JAMES MARTIN: Do you believe that?
GORDON MOORE: I don't personally, but it's certainly something that makes you sit down and think a bit. You look at the rate at which machine intelligence has been improving, and if you could extrapolate that over the next 50 or 100 years, it might happen.
JAY FORRESTER: The problem as you get more and more information is how to even decide what you want.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But our tools are actually getting far better than they have been.
GORDON BELL: I would like to remind you of another Jefferson principle: when he got too much mail, he asked people in a newspaper article to stop writing him!
(Laughter.)
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But Jefferson also spent four to six hours every day in one of these rooms writing answers to the mail he did see. Sometimes I'll get 60 E-mail messages in an hour. How would he cope with that?
JAY FORRESTER: The ultimate seems to me quite clear. We have more and more machines providing more and more information -- for which we will have more and more machines to receive it and throw it away.
GORDON MOORE: That's right. That's the good news!
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: I don't agree with that. I think we're seeing some of the tools that might help us balance the difference between push and pull. A lot of our information systems are push systems. They push information into our electronic or physical in box or our mail box at home, they push it over a broadcast network. We need more control. We now have some tools with the network in place to be able to say "This is what I want to know" instead of "This is what you want to tell me."
JAY FORRESTER: You see, the question is how do you know. what you want me to know? The whole information technology movement is geared to providing more information. I would suggest that the systems approach -- an examination of what policies are producing the resulting behavior, what information you need as an input -- as a prerequisite to understanding what information you want.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: Oh, I agree it will never be a complete pull system. On the other hand, virtually all of our information systems have been imbalanced to be push systems. Not only E-mail, but broadcast of all kinds push things at us instead of telling us what we want to know.
JAMES MARTIN: In business, we're heading for information warehouses. You don't care where they are. You just go in and look for things which are important to a certain type of decision.
JAY FORRESTER: How will you know what to look for? That is the question.
JAMES MARTIN: This is the human skill of the executive.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But it is a balance between push and pull, because you still need news to excite you about the things you don't know about yet.
GORDON MOORE: You know, at the level we're talking tonight, I think we have to back up and say, "What the heck is the objective?" Each of us has spent a career trying to optimize his personal situation and some boundary conditions. That's not the long-term best solution for humanity. If we really want to sit back and say how can we use this new technology to do something important, I think we've got to start by asking the question, "But what the heck is important?"
JAMES MARTIN: That's the gigantic question. Basically, we have got the capability to work miracles. If you look to the society our grandchildren are going to live in, and suppose you could work miracles, what would you want? What would a great society look like?
JAY FORRESTER: You have to bring into it exponential growth of population, and probably of industrialization and of resources and of pollution. Now, that's a big change from the present frame of mind. And how do you achieve that? I think there's going to have to be a broad public understanding of those issues and some of the routes out of the present.
JAMES MARTIN: Well, how do we get that broad understanding? The Club of Rome "limits to growth" was a quarter of a century ago, and it hasn't penetrated much.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: I disagree. I don't think that it has been ignored or a failure. If you look at the green movement, at energy conservation, at water conservation, there have been significant impacts. Now, I guess I wouldn't trace it all to the Council of Rome and "limits to growth", although certainly that was a contributor.
JAMES MARTIN: After the World Three model, people should have said, "Well, this is interesting, but it needs to have much more detail." There ought to have been a lot of ongoing work on the detail of what to do. In fact, everybody was so frightened by its principles that they abandoned it.
JAY FORRESTER: I don't think that's quite right. I think it did produce a rather unavoidable counterforce. If you're going to change a whole set of social attitudes, the first thing will be the counterforce of resistance. And I'm not sure if you're better off trying to beat down the counterforce or just giving it time to choke on its own momentum.
DAVID ALLISON: The debate is really broader than this single issue. The question is whether information technology will be seen as part of the solution or part of the problem. Recently, information technology and the Internet have had a pretty good press. But that's not necessarily the way it's going to be. There's a very good chance that all this information technology will be seen as part of the problem unless people like you take responsibility for making sure that it becomes part of the solution.
GORDON BELL: I think we may be part of the problem. Corporate downsizing couldn't take place without the computer. Reengineering, and changing the old style organizational hierarchy couldn't have been done without the rapid change that we've enabled.
JAMES MARTIN: If the downsizing got worse, and then the public pinned the downsizing on us, on information technology, we could have incredibly bad press.
GORDON BELL: Well, let's not go after it! But I think we can trace a lot of what's happened to information technology and rapid communication.
GORDON MOORE: A couple of years ago the change was graphically brought home to me about what our general technology has done. I went to the Amazon, to an Indian village way out in the boondocks. After taking successive smaller planes out of Brasilia, we finally landed at this little Indian village. Everybody came out. Everybody was naked, with body paint, you know, the real deal. I walked into the village, huts all around. There was a men's club in the middle where they all sat and contemplated what was going on. But right there was a satellite antenna and a solar cell and a TV. It was the Stone Age getting introduced to "Dallas." That's the world we live in!
JAY FORRESTER: Well, I have a friend that likes to climb in the upper Himalayas, and he was planning another trip, and he was walking about organizing the Sherpas to carry the luggage and so forth. I said, "How do you get in touch with them?" He said, "Oh, I just send them a fax."
(Laughter.)
JAMES MARTIN: Let's return to our Jefferson Manifesto. We need more than what we've said.
JAY FORRESTER: Well, I think the Internet is something of a fad. I doubt that we're going to see a continuation of the momentum that we have seen in the last five years with respect to the World Wide Web and the Internet. I mean, you only have to be exposed to it for a few weeks before you find it boring and time-consuming and taking your attention away from other things.
GORDON BELL: Just like television.
JAY FORRESTER: Basically, it's a rather insidious expansion of television.
JAMES MARTIN: I disagree. I believe it is going to totally change the architecture of corporations.
BOB METCALFE: Won't the Internet help end nationalism, as Seymour was saying? By tying everyone together, won't it drive out all these arbitrary differences that cause us to want to kill each other periodically?
DAVID ALLISON: I think you are suggesting that it's going to threaten existing power structures. We can project that this will lead to a utopian situation, but it's more likely, if human history is any indication, not to go that direction.
BOB METCALFE: To take responsibility? what does that mean?
DAVID ALLISON: I think it means promoting those types of uses we think technology should have. It means trying to predict what the power structure changes are going to look like, and working to make sure that they don't threaten, dislocate, or disenfranchise people to such a degree that we cause revolutions.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But David, wait a second. Would you have given the same advice to Gutenberg? You're talking about the same sort of change. He didn't know what he was creating. Nor did he have any control over what would happen with it.
JAY FORRESTER: Nor did he solve the social problems.
JAMES MARTIN: But we have a capability that Gutenberg didn't have, and that is, we can work out logically the consequences of what we're doing, and the effect it's likely to have on employment and society.
GORDON BELL: I don't know about that. You've got certain types of modeling, but it's very hard to speculate.
JAY FORRESTER: It seems to me if you look at history, we've gone through this time after time. The teletype, the telegraph, were going to make big changes, the telephone was, television was, and I'm not sure that any of them really solved significant social problems. In what way did any of them really change our tendencies toward genocide or wars?
DAVID ALLISON: I think television had a lot to do with why the opposition to the Vietnam War happened as it did.
JAMES MARTIN: You look at the rise of Hitler. Hitler could not possibly have risen if Ted Koppel had been on the German television each night.
BOB METCALFE: No, Ted Koppel would have risen!
(Laughter.)
JAMES MARTIN: As we look at the extreme growth of totalitarianism, it was always made possible by extreme distortion of information. Television, as we have it at least in the West today, makes that impossible.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But going back to your point a moment ago, the ability to use this technology responsibly is part of it, but being able to predict all of its consequences and controls is beyond what any of us can do.
DAVID ALLISON: You don't have to predict them all. You do have to be aware, to a greater extent than in the past, that the social consequences are going to happen, that there are going to be severe dislocations, and that they need to be a part of the equation. They are not externals.
JAMES MARTIN: And there could be another approach, and that is to say, given the capability to work the miracles that we expect, what sort of life do you want? What sort of world do you want your children to live in?
Now, there are lots of statements we could make about what is wrong with life today. In fact, many of the things that have happened over the last 20 years have degraded corporate life. So you could make a set of statements about what you would like the world to look like 30 years from now, and then ask the question, how do we get from here to there? Now, isn't that how an engineer ought to think?
GORDON MOORE: That's asking too much of engineers. I'm basically a technologist. Developing technology is what I know how to do. Figuring out the impact of technology on society is not my job.
If we look at developing a new product, we put down what the customer wants, what we can do, where they get together. We never put down what are the social implications of developing it.
JAMES MARTIN: Well, now, you're talking about a customer. Your customer now is the member of society. The customer who is a member of society has certain wishes. How do you give members of society 30 years from now something which would cause them to say, technology has made my life wonderful, as opposed to saying what most people are saying now, technology has screwed up?
GORDON MOORE: I think that's asking too much of technology. Technology can bring you a lot of the modern conveniences and problems. But has the technology that lets you be in touch with your company any place, any time, made your life easier? It's made it easier for our guys to work 80 hours a week than it used to be!
I used to go off on vacation in very remote areas. Nobody could ever get in touch with me. Now the people that run the company read their E-mail every day. They are always available by some kind of communication. I'm not sure their quality of life has improved at all because of modern technology.
JAY FORRESTER: Well, we have these really very contradictory trends. On the one hand in the United States we have movement toward decentralization of government, moving the center of political activity lower. At the same time we have the internationalist movement and the corporations going international and going in exactly the opposite direction. We have a complete contradiction in the forces that are at work. And sooner or later that contradiction, I think, has to be resolved.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: I don't think those are contradictions.
JAY FORRESTER: It is because we are moving toward systems that are less and less under the visible control of the individual.
GORDON BELL: And the individual country.
JAY FORRESTER: Or even the individual country. The individual feeling it move out of control doesn't understand it. He can't control it. He's a victim of it.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: I think a person both needs to get the information and have the ability to act on it. So the change we are going through has significant impact. It has the potential to interact with the way that we educate ourselves; the way we govern ourselves; the way we do commerce, buy and sell, or put out information. The leveling factor that we talked about earlier presents exciting new opportunities.
We're working with the state government in Utah and the Western Governors' Association to create a virtual university, one that doesn't depend on bricks and mortar, one that allows you to learn where you are.
GORDON BELL: How are the universities taking this, by the way?
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: Oh, they are scared to death.
We had a wonderful conference in Las Vegas in November, and the heads of various educational systems in each of 11 western states were there, and the president of the University of Arizona said, "You're taking us to the edge."
GORDON BELL: Universities have withstood technological change for thousands of years. They will resist the Internet.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But Gordon, we graduated 40,000 students last year in our university, people who live across 38 countries. They did that over the network. That's over the edge.
JAMES MARTIN: So when you say virtual university, you really mean worldwide?
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: Right. In fact, most of our new students are in China and eastern Europe and Russia and South America.
SEYMOUR CRAY: I'd like to pursue a slightly different subject, but it follows right onto that. What's going to happen to language in the short term? English, French, Turkish, Chinese, what do you see? We know we've got an Internet that's English, but what will happen?
JAMES MARTIN: What is happening is that intelligent people around the world feel they must be able to read and type English. So there's a market now which didn't exist 10 years ago for 1.5 billion people wanting to learn English. Just imagine that as a business opportunity.
SEYMOUR CRAY: But will the whole world go English? Is that your contention?
JAMES MARTIN: Each nation is going to have its own language, and it's also going to have English.
GORDON MOORE: If there's anything, though, that our technology can do, it's translate languages. And I think that if this becomes a problem, we just put a translation link in there and we all communicate in the language we want.
JAMES MARTIN: That may be true in the far future when translation gets very good. Gordon, that's very hard to do.
GORDON MOORE: That's why we need processing power!
(Laughter.)
GORDON BELL: You're right. That's a challenge.
BOB METCALFE: I knew he'd get to silicon at some point.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: We're running 750,000 hits a day on our home page, and there are nine languages, and less than 3 percent of those connections are in languages other than English. Now, part of that is where the Internet really reaches.
GORDON MOORE: And the people who are on the Internet now are exactly the population that speak English in the countries in the world. But I go to Europe, and I can understand everybody I need except those in England who speak with funny accents.
(Laughter.)
GORDON MOORE: But I almost never meet anybody over there that doesn't speak perfect English.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: It's been two decades since Korea required that children learn English, and nearly that long in Japan, and since the cultural revolution was over, China is in the same position. It's shifting very quickly.
GORDON MOORE: English is the answer for the educated population. In Jefferson's day it was French.
BOB METCALFE: I thought it was Java.
(Laughter)
DAVID ALLISON: I want to go back to your comment that engineers have no responsibility for knowing and predicting.
One of the things we've talked about a lot today is that this group knows a lot about entrepreneurship and the values of entrepreneurship. That is why I think this group can solve all kinds of problems, be they technical or social or economic. Aren't the values of individual freedom and risk-taking important for solving lots of different kinds of problems, not just technological problems?
GORDON MOORE: I think putting the additional burden on an entrepreneur that he also appreciate the social consequences of his technology is way beyond a reasonable deal.
I do think that the general thing that goes on in a technical area, the problem-solving and so forth, is a powerful force for humanity. But I don't want to have to anticipate the social consequences of the technologies I get involved in. It's hard enough to solve the technical problems.
JAMES MARTIN: Who do you think should do that?
GORDON MOORE: I think we have a bunch of people -- government, people who study those things -- who have that responsibility. You can't dump that on the technologist and expect anything to get done.
GORDON BELL: Government will be the last to do it!
GORDON MOORE: Okay, maybe the academics are the ones to do it.
GORDON BELL: That gives the rest of the world something to do while we automate them out of business.
GORDON MOORE: How many of you have ever looked at a technology, and listed the potential social consequences at the end of it when you were trying to do it?
JAMES MARTIN: But you do get quite a lot of people who are entrepreneurs at 20. They become rich by the time they are 40, they digest this, and by the time they are 60 they are thinking, "Hey, what are we doing to the world?"
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: Well, let me go back to your question. I'm very concerned that government is going to "help" the computer industry real soon.
GORDON MOORE: We know they're not.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But they think they are.
(Laughter.)
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: Well, we've been working very hard on some mundane things, like how can we actually get the security and encryption capabilities to address the needs of government, yet also address the requirements of the market? How can we avoid the absolute disaster that government visited on the communication industry for the past 40 years in the computer and information industry?
GORDON MOORE: Are they going to say: "Only 30 percent of the people are going to be able to afford this. Therefore, we're going to increase the division between the haves and the have-nots in society, and therefore we shouldn't do it"?
JAMES MARTIN: We wouldn't say we shouldn't do it. We should say instead we've got to educate the have-nots. We have fabulous technology for education.
GORDON MOORE: Well, you know, I'll do that to increase my market size, but that is a legitimate business interest. It's not looking at it from the social point of view, it's looking at it from the relatively narrow corporate point of view.
JAMES MARTIN: When you look at this on the social point of view, if you solve the social problems, wouldn't you sell more Pentium Pro chips much faster?
JAY FORRESTER: When you speak of educating the have-nots, there are a very small percentage of American teachers who have access to E-mail, never mind the World Wide Web. And so in fact the have-nots are all around us.
JAMES MARTIN: This says that our present education facilities are not working to solve the social problems. Therefore, shouldn't we have more incentives for business to employ people who have been difficult to employ and to educate them and to train them in appropriate jobs?
Some interesting things have happened in business in the last 10 years. Business has now suddenly adopted political correctness, and it's adopted environmental correctness, two correctnesses. Now, aren't there 10 correctnesses, 8 of which haven't been adopted by business yet? One very important one is to say we must educate the have-nots. Otherwise, we're going to have them rioting in the streets.
JAY FORRESTER: It sounds terrible, but we'll be educating them in exactly the sorts of things that have created the present educational disaster.
GORDON MOORE: We say we want to educate the have-nots but only because we want to hire them and we want them to be customers, not for the social good.
JAMES MARTIN: Well, is the reason you're politically correct or environmentally correct for the social good?
GORDON MOORE: It's for the business.
JAMES MARTIN: And then the business does it, because if business doesn't do it the public perceives that business is being evil, like if it was politically incorrect.
GORDON BELL: What's good for Intel is good for the world.
GORDON MOORE: Well, I think that, yes.
GORDON BELL: No, he didn't say that. I did!
(Laughter.)
GORDON MOORE: The beauty of the corporation is that it's designed to have a very specific and narrow purpose, and therefore is efficient. And our purpose is to develop the business for the benefit of the stockholders, principally, which means you have to benefit your customers and one thing and another and employees in the process. But it's not to give to local charities, it's not to save the world, it's for the specific purpose of the corporation. And I think once you start trying to distort the purpose of the corporation you'll destroy the strength of the corporation.
JAMES MARTIN: Then political correctness isn't something corporations should do?
GORDON MOORE: Only if it advances the corporate purpose.
GORDON BELL: Where did you learn this?
(Laughter.)
GORDON BELL: James, this is a thing you're trying to import from somewhere! I mean, if it's the English, those guys are all screwed up! We've got to deal with this problem.
GORDON MOORE: Personally, I worry about a lot of these things. But I absolutely don't consider those part of the corporate job.
GORDON BELL: If a corporation does, watch it go down the tubes. When you see a CEO taking on those kinds of things, it's going to be a couple of years before the organization goes down the tubes. They've lost the focus on what their thing is, every one of them.
I submit the guy who did this the most was William Norris at Control Data. He got into Cold War problems and inner city problems. He thought he knew something, but it turned out to be bad business. There's a good example.
GORDON MOORE: Certainly a corporation shouldn't destroy the environment. It has a responsibility to customers and employees. But these responsibilities are limited.
We're very interested in not ruining the environment in the places where we're operating, but Intel is not saving the rain forest in Brazil or cleaning up Hanford in Washington. Those are somebody else's problems.
DAVID ALLISON: Has the fact that now corporations are interlocked in a global information network changed this dictum at all? Or does it have absolutely no impact? Now you have operations all over the world and information is flowing around in rapid ways and the role of government has changed dramatically because of your technology. Does that change your perspective?
GORDON MOORE: You know, we've always had the view that places we operate would have the same ideal with respect to the local community that we have in the United States. And I don't think the information situation will change that at all.
JAMES MARTIN: If you say that you must not cause pollution in society, will it become reasonable to say you must not do things which will cause rioting in the streets?
GORDON MOORE: The last thing we want is rioting in the streets where we operate.
(Laughter.)
GORDON MOORE: I don't quite know how to handle that one.
GORDON BELL: This is off base, I think. We're way out in hyperspace, aren't we?
JAMES MARTIN: Well, unemployment has become really serious, and they are rioting in the streets. So if you're living in a small town or you've got a factory in a small town, you're very concerned. Therefore, the corporations within the town may need to prevent damage of an extreme sort.
GORDON BELL: With the Internet, I can create scenarios that say, move all work offshore, because nothing matters geographically. Everything moves to an economic place, the lowest-cost economic site.
I can build a scenario that says we have mass unemployment because of the Internet. Now, should we stop the Internet because of that?
JAMES MARTIN: What in reality is going to happen is not that you'll have mass unemployment because of the Internet, but that you'll have zero profit.
It will be like the memory chip business in the 1980s, when you had too many memory fabrication plants. Say you go on the Internet because you've decided you want to buy the latest recording of Beethoven's 9th in Carnegie Hall. So your electronic "agent" goes off to find the cheapest price, and it finds it in China. What that means is that nobody is going to make any profit selling that product.
Now, eventually that will apply to all products. Many products will become commodities. You will have serious cream-skimming effects of the Internet in cyberspace.
GORDON BELL: That's progress.
JAMES MARTIN: No, it's not. It's fundamental change in the ecosystems.
The point I'm making is you're changing the nature of corporations. You are building electronic corporations, "cybercorporations," if you want to use that term. One of the effects is competition which becomes so intense that nobody can make a profit. We're already seeing that, and it's already beginning to bite fairly deep. This means that you are fundamentally changing business ecologies, and therefore the only way to succeed is to understand the ecology that you play in, and work out, like Intel, how you can have the dominant position within the ecology.
You say you want open skies policy in the airlines of Europe. You go on to say you want to bypass the travel agent so the public everywhere can make airline bookings on the Internet, and the consequence of that is that of the 12 airlines which exist in Europe, eight will be bankrupt by the year 2000.
GORDON BELL: Well, they would be already if they weren't subsidized.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: I believe that we've just started.
GORDON BELL: The big down-sizer hasn't hit yet. I'm predicting three more turns of Moore's Law is going to change the whole computer industry, both the performance and the bandwidth. A lot more change is coming. Sure, there'll be a bigger market, but the people who are building machines that are not commodity-based are going to be squeezed. There's a big gap in the computer industry today between the mainframe, the old mini -- which is called the Unix business today -- and the PC. Once the processing power on a chip goes up several more times -- and I say by two or at the most three more turns -- you're going to have a shakeout.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But it's not only that technology, it's also the user experience. It's also the interaction with the customer.
I mean, in this cyberspace that we keep talking about, why does America Online grow at an incredible rate versus Internet service providers who just provide you with a connection?
Those are quantitative differences in the end-user experience. Those kinds of things spell the difference between a successful retailer in this gathering and one that's not. It's a new set of skills, a new set of experiences, a set of capabilities.
JAMES MARTIN: Successful companies will work out how they gain a high return on investment, safe positions within that ecosystem. If they don't ask such questions, then they're going to get beaten up by the system.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: That's just like it was with the telegraph and the telephone and the other innovations that you described earlier.
JAY FORRESTER: It's a matter of, you know, whether the business will be profitable. Whether you can maintain a profit is very much tied up with how quickly somebody can copy what you're doing.
JAMES MARTIN: The copy is getting much bigger.
JAY FORRESTER: If you're building diesel engines, and it requires all those machine tools to do it, it's not nearly as easy to copy, and therefore you can maintain a monopoly. There's very, very little opportunity to maintain a monopoly in what's going on now.
JAMES MARTIN: Business is becoming increasingly knowledge-intensive. Knowledge is much easier to copy and replicate than other resources.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: This is not unlike the problem that existed at the tail end of the French Revolution, when having no protection for intellectual property said it wasn't worth making the investment in it.
So if you want an interesting problem in government, in the role for the government, it's how do you protect intellectual property in this environment?
GORDON BELL: They've totally failed in that. Because that's the one area where we think we've got the edge. Seymour would say, well, it doesn't matter -- we have to think about the world now. I still worry about this country we live in and our budget.
JAY FORRESTER: Government probably cannot provide rules that protect intellectual property in this environment where it is so easy to copy. You can protect if you have to go out and build a factory.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But Jay, it was easy to copy in the presence of a printing press what someone else had written, but government stepped in to provide protection for that.
JAY FORRESTER: But you still had the printing press. You still had the central distribution point. You still had a place where you could go and apply the pressure.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: But compared to a guild completely controlling the information and not allowing that to be transferred to anyone else, it was free and easy to be able to set the type and claim the information or knowledge for yourself. And that actually happened after the French Revolution.
JAMES MARTIN: It isn't a problem if you have good, really well-thought-out laws about protecting intellectual properties. But then Liechtenstein is going to make a lot of money by disobeying them, just as it disobeys the banking laws today.
It can set up facilities with extremely high financial secrecy designed to support drug barons' money laundering, and as soon as we pass laws that protect intellectual property then Liechtenstein can say, "Hey, great, we'll set up bulletin boards which can make that accessible, and nobody can control Liechtenstein."
GORDON MOORE: But it's not Liechtenstein, it's China!
GORDON BELL: You can build a pretty big damn server in Liechtenstein, too.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: You don't have to go to Liechtenstein or China to have a problem. The problem is right here in the United States. Intellectual property laws aren't anywhere close to keeping up with innovation.
BOB METCALFE: I want to get back to education. Someone said today that education is so important we shouldn't leave it to the government.
JAMES MARTIN: War is so important we shouldn't leave it to the generals. Technology is so important we shouldn't leave it to the technical. Education is so important we shouldn't leave it to the educators.
ROBERT FRANKENBERG: It would seem to me that one of Jefferson's strong beliefs was that an educated populace was required for the success of a democracy. An educated populace is also required for the success of a country or of an industry.
The ability to change education into an ongoing experience as opposed to a time or a place in your life is something that's badly needed, and these technologies allow us to do that. The web is a wonderful place to learn a lot in a very short period of time.
And it's going to continue to get better at doing this, the ability to type a few sentences and get materials that express those ideas is six months away over the web.
The library that's here at Monticello pales by comparison.
JAMES MARTIN: The best of what is available electronically today, a new art form, makes possible the kind of education which is absolutely not possible without electronics. You don't see many examples of that -- a few isolated examples. We really have a new art form which we need to perfect, which can be just superb for education and culture, improving life in general.
JAMES MARTIN: That's a good place to end this. Thank you all.