Gilder at his prime

My least favorite question is "what's the next big thing in technology?" for a lot of reasons, from the excessive importance put on "big things" (whatever that means) to the small matter that I still can't predict the future, despite many years of fruitless practice.

What I usually say is that the industry I'm watching most closely these days is energy, not IT, and that not only do I not expect a new "big thing" in IT anytime soon, but we're still just figuring out how to absorb the genuinely revolutionary advances of the 1990s. It's hard to look around at the Web landscape today, from cloud computing to social networking, and see anything that wasn't at least sketched out a decade ago.

With that in mind, I happened to be reading a 15-year-old interview in Wired between Kevin Kelly and George Gilder, and it struck me as profound today as it was then. (Recall that this is before the Web!). Gilder has always been something of a hero to me, and it was delight to be reminded why. Choice quotes:

Gilder anticipating "Free" and, while he's at it, YouTube:

In every industrial revolution, some key factor of production is drastically reduced in cost. Relative to the previous cost to achieve that function, the new factor is virtually free. Physical force in the industrial revolution became virtually free compared to its expense when it derived from animal muscle power and human muscle power. Suddenly you could do things you could not afford to do before. You could make a factory work 24 hours a day churning out products in a way that was just incomprehensible before the industrial era. It really did mean that physical force became virtually free in a sense. The whole economy had to reorganize itself to exploit this physical force. You had to "waste" the power of the steam engine and its derivatives in order to prevail, whether in war or in peace.

Over the last 30 years, we've seen transistors (or switching power) move from being expensive, crafted vacuum tubes to being virtually free. So today, the prime rule of thrift in business is "waste transistors." We "waste" them to correct our spelling, to play solitaire, to do anything. As a matter of fact, you've got to waste transistors in order to succeed in business these days.

My thesis is that bandwidth is going to be virtually free in the next era in the same way that transistors are in this era. It doesn't mean there won't be expensive technologies associated with the exploitation of bandwidth - just as there are expensive computers employing transistors; but it does mean that people will have to use this bandwidth, they'll have to waste bandwidth rather than economize on bandwidth. The wasters of bandwidth will win rather than the people who are developing exquisite new compression tools and all these other devices designed to exploit some limited bandwidth.

Kelly asks "What is the fabric of the network?"

Photons. Electronics are not good for communications. Photons - optical computing - are. What makes photons so great for communication is they don't interfere with each other. They collide and pass on unaffected. You can send them two-way, and they are not subject to electromagnetic disruption. Many signals can flow through one fiber. But the fact that photons don't affect each other means they are cumbersome for computing, since you want interactions in computing. You need to have the charges affect one another - that's the heart of computing. The heart of the transistor function is that you can control a bigger force with a smaller force. But photons don't control each other. So for computing functions I still think that electronics will prevail; but for communications, photonics will prevail.

Comments

[Kevin Kelly]

It's a shame Wired has stopped doing interviews. A good interview can be powerful. You get to places a narrative can't.

Why not run an interview with Gilder now and hear what he is thinking (after the election)? What's after photonics? I'd be happy to talk to him again.

[Koen]

Maybe one statistic may help to help our appreciation of 'next big things in technology'. It takes on average 12 to 14 years before a new technology is being accepted.
Some silicon valley start-ups have done it more quickly, I know. 12 to 14 years is an average. Some are also accepted more slowly.

[Wired Subscriber]

George Gilder Rocks!

[Jim Bursch]

Bandwidth will certainly become so cheap that it can be wasted, but as that happens, it is going to uncover something that will always be dear (barring some great evolutionary leap), and that is mindshare. Like time, mindshare cannot be increased; it can only be reallocated.

It will be an exciting time when the tyranny of bandwidth-constraint is ended and real, unlimited competition for mindshare begins.

My Mindshare 10-Point Declaration
1. My mindshare is mine.
2. My mindshare has real monetary value.
3. I have a right to sell, trade, or keep my mindshare as I choose.
4. Nobody is entitled to take my mindshare without my permission.
5. Unsolicited and intrusive advertising amounts to mindshare theft.
6. Mindshare theft is wrong.
7. I have a right to resist mindshare theft.
8. I demand media that does not deal in stolen mindshare.
9. I support media that respects my mindshare.
10. The world is better when individuals control their mindshare and their media.

[Eben Carlson]

Markets without price information are arbitrarily inefficient and unnecessarily unclear. In many cases, how many clicks something gets is much less valuable information than even a ballpark idea of how much each consumer would be willing to pay for that click--how much each click would is worth.

Free isn't necessarily better than not free any more than welfare isn't always better than a job.

More about premium content and the value of floating content price points on whiteg.com

[transmetteur fm]

Interesting.. It is really a cool scenario, thanks for share such type of information with us..

[christmas stocking fillers]

Nice sharing.So a photon isn't really a particle? Its just a way to describe how energy is transmitted?.Please share something related to it...