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Computing the Future
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18652 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1991 |
2,477 Words |
| Author
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George Gilder
George Gilder is Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute and
author of Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and
Technology. |
TECHNOLOGY 2001
The Future of Computing and Communications
Edited by Derek Leebaert
Cambridge: MIT, 1991
392 pp., $29.95
2020 VISION
Winning in the Information Economy
Bill Davidson and Stan Davis
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991
223 pp., $19.95
"Listen to the technology," urges microchip pioneer Carver Mead of the California Institute of Technology. "Find out what it is telling you."
It is a difficult counsel. Speaking in many baffling tongues, modern science seems a Tower of Babel. New inventions pour forth in an onrush of gadgetry. Whether they be ideas or devices, the novelties of our time often seem less to illumine than to eclipse life's deeper truths.
It is understandable that many of us relegate it all to a black box, or creamy console, and continue to describe events in the old lore and languages. Listen to the technology? It is simpler to watch the evening news, to see the old world still reassuringly on stage, full of the sound and fury of men and nations in primal poses and pursuits. On the screen, technology flickers chiefly as a threat of doom, a toxic waste, or a microchip triviality. At near the speed of light, computers, modems, satellites, and glass fibers flash garbage in to garbage out. Amid all this information, as T.S. Eliot asked, where is wisdom?
Yet, if you listen, the technology tells a tale that will forever change your world.
On the surface, it is a technology of wires and switches, shaping and sharing information. Combined in branching nets of logic spread across minute slivers of silicon, millions of these wires and switches make up a computer. Stretched across the mostly silicon surfaces of continents, the wires and switches become a telecommunications system. Fused into a global ganglion of interconnected tools, the wires and switches of both computers and telecommunications join to form the central nervous system for a new world economy.
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