Editorial: May 9, 1996

"Electricity is one of the major nexus points on this web, on which there are a lot. So electricity is like printing, like the alphabet, like some basic discoveries in chemistry. These are points, kind of major producers of information surge, if you like, in history.

"One of the first things everybody thought electricity was going to do was to be a kind of medicine. First of all, people gave themselves shocks. They saw stars, they fell over, they blacked out, and they did all sorts of things. So electricity was clearly some kind of force that did things to the human body. No one really thought about it in any other way for a long time. Major quacks of the 17th and 18th centuries set up temples of health. One quack called James Graham set up a temple of electrical health where people who couldn't have children could spend the night in an electric bed. In the morning, they would have conceived. There were many different experiments of this kind.

"The other thing, of course, was that nobody knew how the human body worked anyway. Electricity appeared to be one of the magic forces that worked from the brain. For example, how do I sense things when my hand moves? At first, people thought it was blood pressure. Then they realized that wasn't enough. Then, the idea became that the force, the life force of the human body, was electricity. [Luigi]Galvani's experiments with frogs led directly to [Alessandro]Volta's pile and the first battery.

"So, I suppose, in a way, electricity was primarily regarded as a life force. The way in which electricity became what it is now, an energy source, is probably primarily due to people like Benjamin Franklin, who discovered there was something like electricity happening in the sky through their experiments with kites. Franklin nearly died. In fact, many of these early lightning experimenters did die. So, I suppose it was that kind of meteorological connection that led to people recognizing that there was a force here that was an energetic force.

"Of course, the prime example of what that force could do was Sam Morse and the telegraph: sending the force along a wire to do something. Then, you're into all sorts of complications, because the minute you believe that electricity is a force, you get to the relationship between electricity and magnetism. And electricity and magnetism give you dynamos, give you the production of further electricity, spinning magnets, iron core, copper wire, and all of that. And, then, you're into what we know as electricity in the modern world.

"I think what electronics is going to do to society is going to be as big as the alphabet and bigger than the printing press because it will call all institutions into question. None of our institutions are ready for what this—let's use a loose term, 'the Net,' wireless communication, whatever you want to call it—this immensely dense potential for individuals to be on some kind of network in the next 10 years. I don't think any of our institutions are remotely ready for this.

"The ones who are ready for it are the people who are going to do it, the companies like Motorola and others, because that's their job, that's all they do. They concentrate on the production, on the development, on the R&D. The people who are making no efforts to prepare are the public. We are going into the 21st century with 19th-century or 18th-century institutions. Above all, this includes education. Education is the most important institution in society and the least able to keep up with what folks at Motorola and other companies do. The speed of technological change is so fast that you can't, I suppose, expect an educational institution to stay up. You know what they say, 'If you understand how something works, it must be obsolete.' In 10 or 15 years' time, we'll have to reskill ourselves every decade to stay in a job. The educational system is not preparing for that.

"The Internet is going to invite participative democracy. We're not making any attempt to figure out how that would work. We're simply saying, 'Oh, representative democracy is fine. We'll go with it,' and, at some point, more people will start to vote. The trouble is, when you give people the ability to do such things, when you give people an inch, they want a mile. If we won't take two flavors from Baskin-Robbins, why take it from Washington? People are going to find that two parties do not represent the subtleties of their individual views. With something like the Internet, they're going to make that felt. Then, the politicians or their equivalents are going to react. That's going to be a major revolution in the next 40 or 50 years for which we are not at all prepared.

"I think people are so busy (please don't get me wrong) so busy enjoying what Motorola does, that they fail to recognize what it is doing to them. Of course, it's good. I'm a technological optimist. Pessimists jump out the window; they're no damned use to anybody. For example, take a person who carries a cell phone now. I do, and I'm delighted! I can make a call anywhere. If I had a personal number anywhere in the world, I'd say, 'Hooray!' The sooner the day comes, the better. That also, of course, means that I can be contacted anywhere at any time. So, there are many areas in which I think we are not prepared for it.

"I'm not concerned too much about the fears expressed about the arrival of the so-called two-class society: an informed elite and the rest. I believe in the sort of hacker theory of history. I think the cat is out of the bag already. The price of this technology is falling, according to Moore's Law. And, it looks like its going to do it even more. (No pun intended.) I think that, very soon, the technology will be in the hands of a critical mass of people. Not everybody, of course not. And certainly not in Africa. Not for a long time, if ever. But a critical mass of people in what we might describe roughly as Western societies—industrialized or quasi-industrialized societies.

"I think the technology will be in the hands of a critical mass of people, after which the matter of an informed elite will really go away. If you think about what happened throughout history, you get societies structured by the technology they use. So, when you have hieroglyphs, all you get to do is what the pharaoh says. When you have parchment, all you get to do is what the bishop says. And, until recently, when you have radio and television, in many countries apart from the United States, all you got to do is what the state said.

"So, I don't believe that there is going to be a major problem about this informed elite. If you think about the predictions of who would have this technology, even 20 years ago, they've been wildly wrong. I know that, today, schools have only Apple IIs, but, just as with the industrial tigers in Southeast Asia, I think what's going to happen—what will be happening—will be leapfrog jumps. Schools will go from Apple IIs to something immensely faster, because it's cheap. I think, therefore, that Moore's Law will make sure that the elite disappears. I think the elite is already gone. I'd like to believe they're gone."

Technology and politics

"I think that's why we're hearing as much criticism of the political process as we are hearing. I think it's because enough people, a critical mass of people, have access to the political process and a means to express their views of it. They indicate that they are unsatisfied with it, for example. The same thing is true of various other areas like nuclear power stations.

"Twenty years ago, nobody asked you what you thought about nuclear power stations. They just built them. Nobody questioned it because people didn't have access to data or even the opportunity to raise their voices to say, 'Wait a second!' I don't believe that people suddenly discovered that nuclear power is bad as opposed to good. Apart from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, none of the accidents everybody said there would be have happened. So, you would think that people would be approving of them now. People are disapproving now not because people have changed their minds, but because more people are now in the process. And more people are now saying, 'Well, I'm not so desperately keen to have this stuff, just in case Chernobyl happens again.'

"I think the government should give massive tax breaks to technology companies to get this stuff into the schools. It's worth a generation of tax breaks. It's worth the government saying, 'OK, listen. We're going to tighten up and do everything we can and take all that money and give it to corporations in order to get the corporations to get the stuff into the schools.' That's what matters. Because without that, it's going to take that much longer, it's going to be that much harder a road, and it's going to be that much more unexpected and, sometimes, unpleasant surprises down that road.

"What I'm saying, I suppose, is that you should look at the social implications of all technology and make political decisions in the light of that. For example, I think that you guys were nuts to give away your solar-power industry. Which is virtually what you did when President Reagan withdrew all the tax concessions to that industry. And, the Germans bought it like that, because, in 10 years' time, that's going to be a major technology. I think America is no longer in the lead in that technology.

"So yes, I'd say, 'Yippee! And more of the same!' But, think about the social implications of what you're doing and see if you can bring pressure to bear on the politicians to help these things come about, primarily, I think, by getting it into the schools. I wouldn't go any further than that. I don't think government should give tax breaks just to give technology to poor people, because, if you get it into the schools, there will be fewer poor people."

Innovation can't be controlled

"It's impossible to set rules for innovation. Innovation happens almost always serendipitously. Yes, Edison said, 'I shall make electricity so cheap that only the rich will eat by candlelight.' And he was right. But he wasn't the only one to say that or think that.

"So, I don't think it's one great man or woman pointing the way and the rest of us just following. I think innovation always happens almost by accident—even within a laboratory, looking for very specific things. The reason you're looking for specific things is because there's been a shift in the marketplace or more money's available over here or there's a competitor out there. No company exists in vacua. They're always reacting to something. And that something is usually in reaction to something else, and something else, and something else. So there's a kind of domino effect going on, of which a company like Motorola, or someone else, is one of the dominoes. So nobody starts from nothing, creates it, generates it, does the research, and produces the product that is totally unlike anything else in the world. That's not possible. The technology is too interdependent.

"So, I'd say, 'Yippee! Keep going!' Already, I think, there's a change in the marketplace. It's not just that you produce goods and you give them to the poor slobs, and they say, 'Ah—ah. I'll use this.' And they wake up the next day and find out that its changed their life in a way they don't like. We're already past that stage—not much past it, but just past it. The technology itself is becoming cheaper, more accessible, easier to use, more friendly, less environmentally damaging. It's doing all the right things. We're not producing nerve gas a lot. We're producing other things.


Steven H. Leibson
Editor In Chief