There are all these wise-asses in Washington who really think that they can choose technologies. They think they know better … It’s always going to be that way. It’s not going to change with Clinton and Gore. The dog technologies run to Washington, decked out like poodles. The politician is always the dog’s best friend.
For computing functions … electronics will prevail; but for communications, photonics will prevail … Opto-electronics is very important. However, opto-electronics should not be in the middle of the network, it should be on the edges of the network where it links the computing functions to the communications functions.
There’s smartness all around the network, but the actual network should be essentially dumb glass. The fibersphere, as I call it … what you really want is dumb networks where all intelligence is on the fringes. You’ll have intelligent devices of various sorts that are easily reachable from the network but aren’t part of the actual fabric of the network.
The chief effect of these technologies is to put you in command again. The trouble with top-down centralized technologies, which the telephone and television represent, is that they’re dumb equipment attached to complex switching systems and broadcasting technologies. On the other hand, the chief virtue of distributed intelligence is that the network can be dumb and the control of it can be distributed to smart users. That means that technologies are much more servants than rulers of your life … The future is dumb networks.
The scarce resource is the human mind. People will be more valuable. People will get paid better … It’s utter garbage to say that our grandchildren won’t live as well as we do. People who say this just don’t see the technology.
I was thinking about ecological computing … Pretty soon we’re going to have to grow software, and we should start learning how to do that. We should have software that won’t break when something is wrong with it. As a friend of mine once said, if you try to make a Boeing 747 six inches longer, you have a problem; but a baby gets six inches longer 10 or more times during its life, and you never have to take it down for maintenance.
It’s hard to change information in books, but if we have everything online, then a somewhat untrustworthy group of people controlling the thing – which is what I think is what we have – gives us 1984.
Soon all of this shopping- and video-on-demand infrastructure will be in and they’ll use it just to deliver the old medium. At that point people will desperately look around for other things to do with it. Somebody who recognizes that sequence of events could put up a few million dollars now to start getting ready for the moment when they’re going to need the content to put on that new thing.
You really do not want the Library of Congress on your desk. What you want is to be able to get at the Library of Congress from your desk. The reason you don’t want it on your desk is because as it gets out of date you have to worry about maintaining the Library of Congress!
Everybody has gotten so enamored with the decentralization of computers, and the idea that they can put a computer on their desks, that they’re missing the countertrend, which is that all these computers are starting to talk to each other, and that the computing resource that they have available to them is a utility in a sense. So in fact there’s a sort of countertrend to the decentralization of computers, which is this amazing centralization of the computing resource. As communication gets good enough, where something gets done becomes less and less relevant.