The Message of the Microcosm
Gilder, George
George Gilder THE MESSAGE OF THE MICROCOSM A computerized world economy does not care about budget deficits or trade imbalances or national borders. 6,1Li isten to the technology," urges Carver...
...The technology of today is entwined in science and speaks in tongues...
...Meanwhile the computer is down and the programmer is out to lunch with a Sandinista...
...Such concepts as land, labor, and capital, nation and society—solemnly discussed in every academic institution as if nothing had changed—have radically different meanings than before and drastically different values...
...Yet only things which are dropping in price are likely to be contributing to economic growth...
...In the new world, socialists are capable chiefly of destruction...
...The new physics became the microcosm of the future of the race...
...It leads to such statements, portentously delivered, as: "Cuba is 90 miles south of Florida...
...The rapidly declining prices and rising yields of these technologies are the central source of world economic progress...
...If you got in debt, there was nothing to do but to pay in kind, usually by shipping another resource, bullion, in clipper ships across treacherous seas...
...Sounds and images can already be stored in homogeneous digital form in large portable memories with access to huge networked databases...
...Most analysis of the microcosm focuses on digital technology—devices based on interconnected switches that represent all phenomena in numerical quantities...
...For example, such concepts as land, labor, and capital, nation and society—solemnly discussed in every academic institution as if nothing had changed—have radically different meanings than before and drastically different values...
...It is a common notion...
...But in the modern era, the numbers are nearly irrelevant...
...It is false...
...E ven the challenges of national defense yield best to information technologies...
...Today, for example, it takes large computers—or specialized parallel processors—to perform Fourier transforms that convert sounds and other wave phenomena into their fundamental and harmonic sinewaves, or sine-waves into sounds and colors...
...All major chip firms will soon have to comprehend analog electronics...
...Listen to the technology...
...But the United States won theonly valuable remaining resource of Indochina: the boat people...
...YANK SCIENTISTS SHRINK MEMORY CELL TO SIX micRoNs'putting thousands of switches on a spot of silicon no wider than the wing of a flea—seems a less gripping and relevant drama...
...and Lester Thurow, the leading economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, delphically affirms "The Great Depression of 1990" as foretold in the cycle theory of an Indian mystic...
...The crucial change was °the prospect of creating programmable computer systems on single chips...
...Its achievement awaits the predictable fulfillment of existing technological concepts...
...However, in the mid-1980s, a major crisis afflicted the establishment of American microelectronics and this crisis was widely believed to portend major shifts in the entire balance of power in all high technology...
...But nations are not separate, and short of a worldwide retreat to a pre-electronic age, trade will never balance again...
...Particles ride on waves of possibility, masses spring from quantum wombs of probability...
...As they entered the microcosm, making ever more infinitesimal transistors, functions became faster and cheaper, more powerful and more durable, more valuable and, most surprisingly, easier to build...
...As leading inventor Raymond Kurzweil has observed, these facts of information technology apply well beyond the domain of media for software storage...
...It sold for about $20...
...Today computers are far too slow to mingle realistic sound and graphic images in real time...
...The development of analog devices that can connect microcosm to macrocosm (digital to analog, and back) was indispensable to the triumph of the new technology and it will be central to future advances...
...The Soviet Union in turn subsists on Western technologies and the residual values of old world resources, combined with the rewards of gouging and grinding down the Russian people...
...The world hungers for human creativity and freedom...
...The source of the change is the microcosm: medium and metaphor, beginning with quantum physics...
...The key development was not the invention of the transistor...
...Listen to the technology, and the harmonies waft through the mind...
...They depict a world in which matter evolves essentially from mind...
...Rather than a components industry, it would have to embrace and fulfill the revolutionary metaphor of its physical medium...
...There is a vague awareness of the possibility of new and more portable gadgets, a vague fear of a threat to existing jobs and industries, a vague sense of both danger and promise...
...N ow the industry is on the brink of yet another epochal step forward...
...It is true that there are no longer any American troops in Saigon...
...The change is directly analogous to the shift from primitive barter economies to money economies...
...As Walter Wriston has written, we are on a world information standard...
...By functioning as a replacement for the vacuum tube, this new device looked backward as much as ahead...
...technology" from foreigners, as if much of it was not created by immigrants and foreigners and as if most security leaks have not come from Americans...
...The idea of balanced trade originated in the era when trade was dominated by resources, often peculiar to a specific territory...
...Yet the vendors of old expertise continue on as if nothing had happened...
...Their worth derives from the ideas they embody...
...with Latin America as a net debtor to the world rather than as the source of most of the world's wealth and technology...
...Consider the Gross National Product and all the related measures of productivity and growth...
...By creating slaves, the capture of territory destroys its value...
...It is the authentic frontier, invisible and invigorating, and closer to the foundation of reality and the reality of God...
...At that point, the microelectronics industry could rest on its laurels only at the cost of immediate obsolescence...
...The device will capture the knowledge of experts for immediate use at the scene of need, plug into global networks for transmission of voice or mail or access to encyclopedic databases of news, entertainment, and knowledge, all adaptable to personal taste...
...These items do not represent any wide compass of technological change...
...But that vision skews the reality...
...But the most important new developments cannot be predicted...
...Everything important about Cuba—Cuban culture, enterprise, cuisine, entertainment, people—is already in Florida and other parts of the United States...
...By the time any problem has been digitized, however, most of the significant thought has already been done...
...Ninety percent of its value derived from the contributions of the writers, the editors, the publishers, the distributors, the retailers, all of whom were American...
...But they assume hardware depends on rare materials and manufacturing skills...
...It is a difficult counsel...
...But today trade in goods is inhibited by culture, protectionism, and transport costs while capital markets are globally on line 24 hours a day...
...Blind people read...
...The fall of Goliath—the imperial state—will reverberate through the structures of world society...
...Authorities cannot seize power and wealth...
...But perceptual or analog powers once taken for granted will loom as the most formidable challenges...
...Goods are nearly the least important entity in international exchange...
...They speak of the U.S...
...The computer revolution is in the process of restoring the essential primacy of the word over the world, the logos over the firmament, mind over matter, free men over collectivist determinism...
...economic statisticians have essentially ignored the most important phenomenon in the world economy: the computer revolution in America...
...But few people comprehend that the microcosm of modern electronics is transvaluing all the things of the world, transforming all the landmarks, vitiating most of the academic disciplines...
...Creating weapons of defense chiefly based on information rather than on matter, free men can save themselves at a steadily declining cost...
...individuals perform entire Beethoven piano concertos on one instrument...
...Such an appliance is already feasible in theory...
...Far from demeaning man, as Orwell and others predicted, the new technologies are an unprecedented force of emancipation and hope...
...In a recent debate on American competitiveness, I held up a book called Manufacturing Matters that makes a powerful case for manufacturing as the crucial source of economic power in the modern world...
...The key themeof the new physics is the obsolescence of conventional materialism...
...Most of the purchasers were American and they captured the value of the ideas in the book, the consumer's surplus it imparted...
...Yet tiny portions of the eye and ear perform similar computations continually in real time by analog means...
...As the world confronts the promise of superconductors, photovoltaics, and other energy converters that will eventually increase fuel efficiency by compounded factors of ten and more, all the old geopolitical verities surrounding the production of energy are collapsing like Oklahoma banks...
...The silicon in sand and glass forms a global ganglion of electronic and photonic media that leaves all history in its wake...
...Hardware, too, is a similar information product...
...Once again, things that drop in price are assumed to be dropping in value...
...In the modern world, productive immigrants are not a burden...
...and Japan, or Europe and Asia, are already converging rapidly...
...From the onset of digitization, the problem becomes material and determinate, released from the creative vagaries of analogical thought into the mechanical routines of computation...
...T oday the most important products are essentially made of the sand in chips of crystalline silicon...
...What is absolutely clear is that the least significant thing about such products is the material resources they embody...
...Listening to the technology opens us to a new sense of the music of the spheres, a new sense of the power of ideas, a new integrated vision of the future of humanity...
...They will unfold in the continuing adventure of ideas—the eternal surprises of the mind of man in touch with the mind of God...
...Soon the makers of typewriters and keyboards will see their markets shrink...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick, for example, gave a speech, quoted respectfully in the Wall Street Journal, in which she said it was impossible to understand what is going on in the world without a comprehension of geography, "an idea of where things are...
...the way you win a cold war...
...While the cost-effectiveness of computer components and related products has risen several millionfold and the price of a transistor has sunk from $9 in 1955 to about eight ten-thousandths of a cent in 1987, the estimates of national productivity have entirely ignored the change...
...The microcosm is a new continent and its exploration brings richer rewards than were won by any earlier pioneers...
...All value comes from free minds...
...Yet contemporary computers all give short shrift to analog experience...
...Visit the Pentagon, or the New York Times, and everywhere there are maps, solemnly defining national borders and sovereign territories...
...By cutting taxes, extending liberty, and unleashing the ingenuity of its people, a nation can lure the precious wealth of willing workers and immigrant geniuses from the antipodes in rowboats and bring torrents of money in from the skies,bounced off satellites around the globe...
...They count widgets and bemoan debts without the slightest notion of their meaning or promise...
...Material wealth gives way to immaterial products, in which the worth reposes in ideas rather than resources...
...They speak of protecting America from Japanese electronics companies which provide indispensable components to America's world-leading computer firms...
...The world is awash in financial capital, glutted with raw materials, replete with petrochemical plants, steel mills, and other leviathan forms of material wealth...
...With 70 trillion dollar worldwide capital markets operating in real time, there is no longer any more reason for a balance of trade between the United States and Japan than between any two American states...
...at the most fundamental level, matter does not behave like a Newtonian solid or like any substance normally seen as material...
...The U.S., like all other countries, will again be "independent" only if it is willing to be poor...
...the changes are qualitative...
...Yet economists and politicians everywhere speak as if nothing has happened...
...It reflected the familiar materialist fallacy—a totemistic preoccupation with thingsin a world where value chiefly resides in thoughts...
...The story of the microcosm is essentially a saga of American triumph...
...6,1Li isten to the technology," urges Carver Mead of the California Institute of Technology, "find out what it is telling you...
...But for the last twenty years the U.S...
...If it tried to replace existing components, it would tie itself to existing systems while the microcosm was transforming the possibilities of all information technology...
...Depending on the quality of the design, they will sell for between $10 and several thousand dollars...
...Reality too stems from information...
...These huge maws, unaccountably missed until now, might seem to symbolize the current state of scientific knowledge...
...Boeing 747s constantly traversing the oceans foster a global community of 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 commerce...
...They rush to judgment, cutting up the rich sensory fabric into bits, abruptly converting all inputs to numerical form...
...Yet it is the astronomical reduction in the price of computing that has made it the most important force and most valuable industry in the world economy...
...They are incalculably precious...
...All the land and slaves they left behind are next to worthless...
...The competition that issued from this change consisted chiefly of hundreds of new American electronics companies that today collectively generate revenues of close to $10 billion...
...Consider the apparently undeniable statement that Cuba is an island ninety miles south of Florida...
...Even oil, once the exception to prove the rule, is succumbing to the microcosm...
...But in its impact on the world and its future all Angola put together is not worth one industrial park in Waltham, Massachusetts, and a billion slaves in China are less significant than a thousand students at Caltech...
...Governments can increase their sway only by releasing their controls and emancipating their people...
...But what could be less significant, I asked, than where this book was manufactured...
...Analog is thus critical to most of the new domains of artificial intelligence...
...The world is all too much with us...
...It is no longer necessary to take physical possession of goods exchanged...
...Even the creation of the integrated circuit, combining several transistors and other components on a chip, only intimated the possibilities of the technology...
...Consider a few new products introduced by three small companies in Massachusetts run by Kurzweil, one remarkable inventor-entrepreneur...
...To focus on the creator of the material embodiment rather than on the intellectual content was a new superstition...
...T n creating electronic devices, engineers began defining computer architectures, and in defining computer architectures, they shaped the future of information technologies, which in turn have reshaped human reality...
...All computers have to connect to the real world through analog or linear devices that can measure or mete out temperatures, voltages, waves, weights, pressures, frequencies, and amplitudes...
...The microcosm offers a new prophetic frame for the history of the technology...
...For the next twenty years, this will be the rule: follow the flows of refugees, watch the migration of capital, buy the waves of invention and the wealth of faith and hope, sell anything you can see...
...As the industry moves in this direction, the next twenty years will see the continued merging of digital and analog technology, creating systems that go beyond mere computing to see and hear, synthesize and shape, learn and memorize...
...Or contemplate the widely accepted notion that the United States lost the war in Vietnam...
...The triumph of a computer as world chess champion awaits only a resolute effort with application-specific chips...
...Within the next twenty years, computer speeds will rise and memories grow to the point that all information can be homogeneously stored and instantly displayed...
...Counting widgets at the border, economists compare the U.S...
...The information age is not some strange artificial development, contrary to the scientific understanding of reality...
...These measures actually ascribe full value to the spread of parasitic bureaucracies, or to the shift of food prepatation from your kitchen to Burger King's, or to the proliferation of subsidized steel ingots by West German factories or to the accumulation of capital in Japanese banks...
...This is the chief attainment of the last twenty years and the fulfillment of its promise is the most exciting challenge of the twenty years to come...
...the Middle East is a strategic hub...
...In order to create thinking machines, it will be necessary to give analogical powers to the computer...
...Yet intellectuals, supposedly masters of ideas, refuse to believe in any value they cannot see or weigh...
...A few months ago astrophysicists discovered, "in nearby galaxies," black holes many times larger than the sun...
...if the floppy contains Lotus 1-2-3, it can be sold for $395...
...money is still national, trade must balance, nations must barter...
...The eyes and ears do not compute equations...
...Now the troops move on murkier grids, but no one doubts the underlying metaphor of territorial contest...
...In relative terms, these things are nearly worthless...
...Contemporary economics, however, has arrived at no way of estimating the value of these items or their role in economic expansion and progress...
...more than half the physicists at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Berkeley, Dartmouth, and Stanford, among other centers of enlightenment, have pledged to boycott all efforts to thwart enemy missile attacks on their country...
...By imposing price controls, travel restrictions, capital curbs, or protectionist barriers, a nation can debauch its people, debase its currency, and flush its banks in a minute...
...It is simpler to listen to the evening news, to watch the old world still reassuringly on stage, full of sound and fury, puffed up:with mythic power and menace...
...Yet newspapers solemnly report events in places like Zaire and Lebanon as if they were of significance...
...As the technology became more powerful, it became easier to use and endowed individual humans with increasing dignity and authority...
...Or consider the language of economics...
...In the microcosm, the arms race is spiraling increasingly into control...
...The exchange of capital was no more efficient than the exchange of goods...
...Matter ultimately is based on information...
...The descent into No one shows any signs of knowing that we no longer live in geographic time and space, that maps of nations are fully as obsolete as the charts of a flat earth .. . 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 the microcosm became an expedition onto the frontiers of world industry, technology, and power...
...At the heart of any computer or telecommunications console or design system are a few crucial microchips...
...Even the first phases of this new technology, however, are radically changing the dimensions of time and space...
...In volume, each of them also costs a couple of dollars to manufacture...
...in the old lore and languages, emblazoned with the old headlines...
...In essence, it will be possible to create a portable appliance that can take dictation, translate English into Japanese and back, play music or synthesize small orchestras, display high definition films or other graphic materials on a flip up screen or project them onto a wall, or even form three dimensional graphic designs and extrude them as plastic models...
...In this descent, engineers made the amazing discovery that as things became smaller, comprising dimensions less than one-hundredth the width of a human hair, they did not become more vulnerable to defects, more difficult to build, or more complex to apply...
...This crisis is often ascribed to the policy and behavior of the Japanese...
...The problem has been identified, defined, structured, measured, prepared for computation...
...Laws get passed, editorials written, speeches delivered, soldiers dispatched, for all the world as if we still traveled in clipper ships and communicated chiefly by mail...
...That amid such disheartening confusions many researchers claim to have fathomed the origins of the universe and the death of God, bespeaks an awesome faith indeed...
...In the microcosm, the U.S...
...Above all, do not stop the arms race...
...Wealth and power are products of emancipation, deregulation, immigration, tax reduction, liberty...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 19...
...Similarly, in the information economy, value also springs less from things than from thoughts...
...In an age when men can inscribe worlds on grains of sand, conventional territory no longer matters...
...A development like SDI is nearly a sure thing...
...If the cassette contains Top Gun, a video store can earn hundreds of dollars renting it out...
...Angola, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iran, South Africa are the new arenas for capture the flag and they can be made to fit in the old dramaturgy...
...T ike the contents of a book, the L code on a floppy, or the signals on a compact disk, the design of a microprocessor—or a computer—is a digital program...
...Reporters transferred from Connecticut to Angola, or from California to China, imagine that they are being promoted...
...was massively winning the cold war by capturing its refugees and dominating its technologies...
...The some 10,000 professed Marxists on American faculties and many thousands more fellow travelers cling to materialist superstitions like so many pygmies worshipping trees...
...People in the industry readily accept the notion that the value of a floppy disk resides in the program on it...
...But even the computer's printed circuit boards and plastic chassis were products of computer aided design and manufacturing software which created their value...
...Hearing, seeing,interpreting, recognizing patterns, intuitively connecting them, these will be seen as the essence of thought...
...The silicon in sand and glass forms a global ganglion of electronic and photonic media that leaves all history in its wake...
...The real crisis—the transformation of the industry from making components to designing systems—originated in the U.S...
...they are the way you keep score...
...We find new harmonies of integrated knowledge, joining physics and economics, computer science and geopolitics, reality and religion...
...They are information technologies and their value is invisible...
...In order to fulfill the promise of computers, computer scientists will have to learn from the brain rather than claiming that it is only a rather sluggish digital machine...
...The microcosm dictates a further collapse of time and space in the world economy, relegating the nation-state and its overweening rulers to the fringes of human history, and rolling up the powers of the cosmos into a crystal ball the size of a man's hand...
...For example, Intel's new 386 microprocessor, the central processing unit for the new generation of IBM personal computers, sells for some $395 apiece...
...The effects are already drastic to some people—to the blind and to the makers of flutes and pianos...
...nothing else matters...
...Protected by ignorance and nostalgia, the media and the politicians continue measuring miles in Namibia rather than microns in matter as the crux to the future of the globe...
...The information content has been provided...
...The Vietnamese in America are already incomparably more productive than the Vietnamese in Southeast Asia and the gap will increase steadily over the next twenty years...
...They.speak of protecting "U.S...
...But depending on the ideas inscribed on them, they sell for between ten and several hundred times their cost...
...The experts seem to know a lot about the big bang and the spin on the Strange Quark, but not much about the cough in the carburetor or cause of the baby's headache, or about the differences between men and women, or whether the world is getting warmer or colder, or both...
...An onslaught of technological progress was reducing much of economic and social theory to gibberish...
...Possibilities and probabilities are not things...
...In the course of these developments, feats of thought once regarded as difficult—such as computer chess—will seem relatively routine...
...in the mid-1980s...
...Japan, a set of barren islands, has used microelectronic devices to become one of the globes two most important nations...
...The microcosm is changing politics, economics, and philosophy, and ushering in a new age of liberty...
...Slaves are virtually worthless...
...The medium of the new technology, the new physics is also a metaphor of the information economy...
...Behind the backs of a bomb-blinded and Brobdingnagian world—its eyes glued to irrelevant tragedies of retarded nations—a new age is emerging...
...Until the new immigration law of 1986 the U.S...
...Nearly half of all human brain cells seem to be devoted to perceptual processing...
...Everywhere politicians and economists are talking about trade balances...
...Israel, a desert-bound society, uses microelectronic agricultural systems to supply eighty percent of the cut flowers in Europe and compete in avocado markets in New York...
...No one shows any signs of knowing that we no longer live in geographic time and space, that the maps of nations are fully as obsolete as the charts of a flat earth, that geography tells us virtually nothing of interest about where things are in the real world...
...Nonetheless, studying economics and other social sciences, I began to realize that the old disciplines were breaking down, the familiar categories slipping away...
...Replacing huge projectiles and megaton explosives with ever more precise and flexible information systems and vast hardware and software networks with a proliferation of intelligent machines, weapons of defense can be rendered harmless to anything but their offensive targets...
...the Cape of Good Hope is a geopolitical choke point...
...It is understandable that many of us relegate it all to a black box, or a pastel panel, and continue to describe events George Gilder is the author of Wealth and Poverty and The Spirit of Enterprise...
...E conomics, sociology, geopolitics, art, religion all provide powerful tools that have sufficed for centuries to explain the essential surfaces of life...
...I could have held up a videocassette or a compact audio disk or a software package on a floppy disk...
...Perception is necessarily analog...
...By basing the technologies of defense on the learning curve of the microcosm, the destructive threat can be contained...
...YANK TROOPS MOVE UP SIX MILES," the New York Herald Tribune blared in my youth, and I could understand the message: the gridiron vision of Korea as territory at stake...
...losing its "independence" and sovereignty, its control over its destiny, as if economies still were separate entities, as if countries were autonomous, as if the new net of global enterprise had never been created...
...Like the book, all cost some two dollars or less to manufacture...
...The full richness of the physiology of the brain provides a protean palette of analogs for all sensory experience...
...To many observers, there seems nothing truly new under the sun—no need for a deep understanding of man's new tools—no requirement to descend into the microcosm of modern electronics in order to comprehend the world...
...the cortex does not digitize and only rarely counts...
...With this rock, the individual will arm his sling...
...They can only grow strong by attracting and liberating creative men and women...
...A book is a typical example of information technology...
...In order to succeed, the semiconductor industry would have to become a creator of new information systems...
...Thus interceptors can be dispersed rather than centralized, obviating most of the software problems that perplex the Concerned Scientists...
...The manufacture of the book cost about $2.00...
...Semiconductor companies will increasingly have to master the physics of analog circuitry...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 17 Indeed, most economic statistics assume that things which are dropping in price are declining in value...
...That's software, they say...
...While the cost of computer power in all its forms has been dropping at a compound pace of about 30 percent a year, the national statisticians long assumed no change at all in the price of computing...
...they are thoughts...
...Scientific American, transcending mere science, discovers the United States as a fount of worldwide hunger and poverty...
...In 1985, the Federal Reserve finally made a minor adjustment and pretended all was well, thus proclaiming that they had no idea of what is going on...
...Part of a global market beset increasingly with substitutes, oil is rapidly losing its political sway...
...The total income of Cubans in America is already about four times the GNP of the island in the Caribbean, which subsists on billion-dollar subventions from the Soviet Union...
...It may be rendered on a pattern generator tape or it can be dispatched down fiber optic cables in microseconds, bounced off satellites around the globe, and captured by a workstation anywhere in the world...
...Within the Pentecostal chorus, minor prophets prate of nuclear winter and acid rain, viral plagues and carcinogenic plastics...
...That is what, at the physical level, the brain is...
...But the beginnings are nearly invisible in the GNP...
...Money has become global and microcosmic...
...They are inventions that change people's lives...
...Such considerations are alien to most economic analysis...
...The world, however, is not essentially numerical...
...Did the author even know...
...As chips become more integrated, they will increasingly contain analog devices...
...Listening to the technology, we do not suffer forces of inscrutable fragmentation...
...what they seize they destroy...
...Although most so-called cognitive science focuses on ratiocination—the logical manipulation of digital data—perception is in fact central to thinking...
...The worldwide network of satellites and fiber optic cables, linked to digital computers, television terminals, telephones and databases, sustain worldwide markets for information, currency and capital on line 24 hours a day...
...Digital computation itself will emerge as merely a new form of mechanics...
...people begin to talk to their word processors...
...In the future, such memories will be far larger and more readily accessible...
...Did anyone care...
...With other new technologies of materials science, bioengineering, robotics, and superconductivity, all also heavily dependent on the microchip, informations systems are radically reducing the significance of so-called raw materials and natural endowments, nations and ethnic loyalties, material totems and localities...
...if it bears the kernel of a specialized operating system for a new supercomputer, it may sell for millions...
...Where it is made is much less significant than where it is conceived, and where it is either made or conceived is less significant than where it is used...
...Such devices include keyboards, displays, sensors, motors, and transducers...
...In the microcosm, the conventional modes of measurement are simply irrelevant...
Vol. 20 • December 1987 • No. 12
