A Talk with Bob Metcalfe
HE INTERNET HAS MANY FATHERS, T but one of them indisputably is Dr. Bob Metcalfe. Inventor of the seminal electronic-networking standard, Ethernet, and founder of 3Com Corporation, he is also...
...Metcalfe We can certainly foresee the day now when computers will be smarter than people and that will be transformational—my friend Ray Kurzweil puts the date around 2029...
...Metcalfe Not postage paid to the government—to the carriers, the Internet service providers...
...TAS My God—the Internet is a socialist Trojan horse...
...Even when Republicans get elected, it still gets bigger...
...So then the mission isn't delivering the mail anymore, and therefore things like better technology are secondary...
...Ever...
...So as a result the Internet has economic problems and security problems...
...Well, excuse me—the families are even more idiosyncratic and corrupt than corporations are, and we're seeing that exposed now at the Times, which has stopped being a newspaper and started being a propaganda sheet...
...Are we pushing change too fast...
...But so do I, which means I can keep saying that he, like an astrologer or an alchemist or a Nazi, shouldn't be teaching at MIT...
...Look at the mess they made by having Web addresses be completely disconnected from trademarks...
...TAS So far the debates about things like cloning and genetically modified food do seem to produce more heat than light...
...I love being in this...
...We were hippie graduate students—we didn't think anyone should be charging for anything...
...Of course professors, with their little geographical monopolies, all hate that idea...
...I just hope MIT does not damage itself by trying to be too much like Michigan...
...Medicine is still pretty much a cottage industry and the technology reveals that...
...Metcalfe The only companies that can afford basic research are monopolies...
...TAS How about a tour of some of today's medieval castles...
...They weren't concerned with economics...
...And as the quality improves—which is inevitable—the Internet will 'become an ever-more attractive alternative to travel...
...Metcalfe That was our question...
...But over time, people at the universities forget in their daily routine that they're an exception, that they're on the dole in effect...
...TAS Lectures and all...
...And then have recitation sessions with local professors...
...We used to hear it from Katharine Graham, may she rest in peace, and we still hear it from Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.—how the family-owned newspaper is such a great thing, as opposed to evil corporate ownership of the media...
...I just use instant messaging minimally—it's how I reach my daughter...
...Metcalfe I have a little hobby—I believe that the Big Bang Theory is false, because my intuition refuses to accept that everything goes back to this one tiny point...
...My father called me up after a week and said please get this thing out of here...
...But I say in the long run technology trumps politics...
...I'm not against affirmative action, but Michigan was going too far...
...Metcalfe You have to be prepared to annoy people to be an innovator...
...And not only that, the people who make it, they check too.' TAS How do they know what to check for...
...They're educational for one thing because a lot of the screwiness results from people not understanding what's going on, not understanding the basic facts and the science...
...Metcalfe Opportunists and demagogues will always use social problems to try to get power and wealth...
...There were those smart guys in the front raising their hands and yelling things out and pointing out errors that he was making, but most of us were just sitting there...
...And all along we've been thinking it was the Pentagon building a communications network to survive World War III...
...Metcalfe The big argument is whether they're stupid or evil...
...Metcalfe Internet video...
...Inventor of the seminal electronic-networking standard, Ethernet, and founder of 3Com Corporation, he is also known for what has become known as Metcalfe's law—the idea that the value of any human network increases as the square of the number of people using it...
...I was lucky enough to have the best physics professor in the world—Tony French at MIT, in 1964...
...Can we keep the pedal to the metal technologically without losing too many people along the way...
...Here's a $1.5 trillion industry—in my current position, I am privy to many conversations about prospects for information technology in hospitals, and it's unbelievably dismal...
...But when you compare what it cost us to have monopolies to what the results were from the research centers that they supported, I come down on the side of breaking those monopolies and getting the research done some other way...
...Just do a videoconference and save yourself two days of travel...
...Metcalfe Tom Knight, who's an old friend of mine at MIT, has this project where students design an organism—they send their design out and back come these little creatures...
...If that means more government support for basic research at the big universities, so be it—despite what a lot of people think, the money gets used pretty efficiently...
...And every one of them says: you have to fix your intuition because the Big Bang Theory is true...
...politics trumps economics'—you called that 'disheartening.' Metcalfe Of course, it was a politician who was telling us that...
...I don't care about the URL...
...TAS What happens if instead of getting bewildered at sixty, people start getting bewildered when they're twenty...
...At a cocktail party I asked him, 'Tom, what if someone designs something really dangerous?' He said, 'Oh, we check for that.' Well, that's good...
...When you were a youngster, a lot of the heavy lifting was done by big companies with big research budgets—places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, where you started out...
...I'm going to get a Nobel Prize for it some day...
...Even now I doubt they'll stop...
...The other solution, the right one, is some form of postage, to introduce the novel (for the Internet) idea of costs—other than the costs in time to all of us who have to clean the stuff out of our in-boxes every day...
...It is a really sad thing to learn...
...Metcalfe The answer you always hear is that the docs just like doing business the way they learned it in medical school, and they're not learning anything new...
...Even so, the local telcos are slowly surrounding the Internet...
...Metcalfe What about the fossils...
...Amazon is amazing as a service for readers, but one of its less-remarked effects is making it economic for books other than blockbusters...
...Now it probably won't be 'beings' in the usual sense—maybe it's Google, going inside your head, a little implant...
...TAS Oh no—the post office...
...You'd think the mission of the post office is to deliver mail, but then you try to close a post office and the people come out of the woodwork because it's a place where they meet, or their friend Charlie is the postmaster and they don't want him to lose his job...
...Metcalfe Think about the hundreds of millions of dollars now being raised for the presidential campaigns—virtually all that money is going to be spent on TV...
...Technology wins in the end...
...There are two solutions...
...So they're trying to have it taxed into oblivion...
...I say both...
...TAS And meanwhile computers just keep getting smarter and faster...
...But these are all really complicated subjects, and we are not wasting our time by having these discussions...
...All right, where isn't technology working...
...So in the 1990s they just said no...
...TAS You've quoted Reed Hundt saying, 'Economics trumps technology...
...Bewilderment is right up there, too, as a harnessable political force...
...I don't think so...
...For example, using the Internet for phone—it's simple technically, but the telopolies don't want that to happen...
...Metcalfe The early emphasis was on getting the Internet into schools—now, increasingly it's going to be on using the Internet instead of schools...
...Metcalfe Unfortunately, the people who built the Internet were not concerned with spam...
...Metcalfe Don't you want the world's best physics professor to give the lecture in Newtonian mechanics...
...That alone will add a hundred IQ points to everyone...
...Metcalfe The New York Times and big media in general are cruising for a bruising...
...I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out...
...TAS What about plain old bewilderment...
...TAS We'll take your word that that's a good thing...
...Does that mean stop everything, the whole relinquishment argument...
...In the Cultural Revolution, they killed everyone with glasses...
...Now little books can find their audience, too, even if it's scattered across the planet...
...public schools, which are being centralized, bureaucratized, politicized, and driven steadily downhill at increasing expense...
...For the first time we'll have—I hate to say it—beings around who are smarter than we are...
...Metcalfe One of my hobbies is irregular verb conjugation: I am firm, you are stubborn, he is a pigheaded fool...
...They just want things to stay the same...
...Where's the FCC...
...The good news is that the Internet is also highly adaptive, and the trademark problem has already been worked around...
...That's bewilderment...
...Once we form the opinion, we become evidence processors and we just collect all the evidence that supports our opinion and reject all the evidence that disputes it...
...the government was paying our salary...
...And you can shut down progress...
...On the other hand I recently tried to put an e-mail station in my parents' house—they're eighty-two years old—so they could exchange e-mails with their grandchildren...
...Violins are European cultural imperialism...
...Metcalfe The trouble with governments is that they've become jobs programs and the workers get to vote...
...When I want to find a Web site I go to Google and type in a key word and off I go...
...Metcalfe I learned one really sad fact from my career as a columnist: nobody changes their mind about anything...
...Does the political culture of a place like Cambridge ever give you pause...
...TAS During the latest affirmative action debate, they made it pretty clear that, one way or another, 'diversity' policies in admissions were going to continue, no matter what the Supreme Court said...
...TAS A lot of people wonder why taxpayers should support this...
...TAS Is it the privacy question...
...TAS But the peasants have their pitchforks out—what's another fat target...
...The interesting word is 'telepresence'—the substitution of telecommunications for transportation...
...TAS You haven't lost any of your love for the phone companies...
...If only I knew enough math...
...And I'm glad we're worried...
...Metcalfe That's just the beginning—the same thing is happening with books...
...TAS Actual living things...
...TAS You're Noam Chomsky's boss...
...Metcalfe Health care is not adopting new technology the way it should...
...It sounded a lot like the old segregationists, trying to stay one step ahead of the Justice Department...
...THE SPECTATOR talked with him at his office outside Boston...
...Metcalfe The Internet was developed by people with no interest in economics at all...
...Since abandoning Silicon Valley a decade ago, Metcalfe has gone on to new lives as a technology pundit and a venture capitalist...
...Then there's genomics and artificial intelligence—does any of it worry you...
...We could have watched it on TV And anyway at MIT these days, attendance at lectures is running below 50 percent—the kids just get the materials online...
...Metcalfe Bringing the government in to try to solve the spam problem is a seriously bad idea...
...Being worried is the right way to be...
...And the Times complains editorially about media consolidation without explaining why they themselves had to buy the Boston Globe...
...He's also been a trustee of his alma mater, MIT, since 1992...
...I'm reminded of the castles that got built all over medieval Europe, and then during the Renaissance someone came up with cannons and blew them away...
...They try to blame the poverty on external forces, not their own bad ideas...
...Right now for most people it's still that jerky little postage-stamp thing, but Internet video is going to continue getting better and better every year—video telephone calls, video conferencing, video merchandising, you name it...
...When Chuck Schumer and the Christian Coalition are cosponsoring technology legislation, one is tempted to say: heaven help us...
...And he's an engineer...
...Metcalfe I love it...
...Chomsky has plenty of freedom of speech, so don't worry about that...
...TAS Speaking of smart, you're an MIT trustee—technically, a life member of the MIT Corporation...
...And then they say, 'He's a world expert in computational linguistics'—this is a guy who gives intellectual cover to mass murderers...
...But worried is a good way to be...
...Where I live in Maine is full of people who dropped out of the rat race who went there to escape their bewilderment...
...They're living rich, happy lives without the intrusion of all this stuff that's happening in the big cities...
...The status quo is willing to lie, cheat, and kill to stop you...
...TAS Politicians still like to press the flesh...
...One—the legal route—is to start regulating speech, which is a slippery slope...
...Look at the University of Phoenix—it's now the largest university in the world, and the students don't go to buildings...
...Our food was free...
...Are the inmates taking control...
...Think about how the telephone changed the world...
...Metcalfe We're all learning you can really do a lot without pressing the flesh, and you don't have to get on all those airplanes and in all those hotels and rent all those cars and be away from your family and alienated from your children...
...innovation is a weed.' Explain...
...And if you think post offices are bad, try government-run indoctrination centers, a.k.a...
...The problem right now is that e-mail is free, and free is really cheap...
...The so-called bloggers, Matt Drudge and the rest, got a lot of the credit for exposing the recent scandals at the Times...
...they're the ones that have to pay for all the infrastructure to actually carry the stuff You want to dump a ton of mail on me and my customers...
...I think that's a reasonable response—not mine, but reasonable...
...The status quo does not want innovation...
...Metcalfe Our great universities are an exception to the general rule that government should get out of the way—we need big public institutions to do the scientific research our society depends on for its freedom and prosperity...
...TAS What about the Web...
...That will cost you twelve cents or thirteen cents or a penny or a tenth of a penny each—as soon as you have a billing mechanism for mail, spam ceases to be economic...
...What if it was caused by photons just getting tired as they go through space and shifting to the red as they give up energy...
...Metcalfe They all worry me...
...TAS How about scientific research...
...Then the universe wouldn't be expanding and you wouldn't have a model showing it all going back to a single point, and that would satisfy my intuition...
...Metcalfe That's happening in Europe—you see it in the hostility to all things American and all things technological...
...Start with schools...
...it's bad for their monopoly business...
...I complain about him at meetings all the time and people say, 'Well, we tolerate freedom of the mind.' Well the guy doesn't have one...
...Even MIT is now committed to putting all of its course materials online and making them available to anyone...
...Here's another, which applies to the various debates about cloning: I am ethical, you are religious, and he is a fundamentalist fanatic...
...Metcalfe The trick is to get to people before they form their opinions about something, when there's still time to influence them...
...That whole industry is broken when it comes to the adoption of new technology...
...TAS Another cheerful thought...
...TAS What about government, politics...
...The government hasn't gotten smaller that I remember...
...TAS The counterargument is that there's no substitute for being there, for looking somebody in the eye and pressing the flesh...
...Metcalfe We had the president of MIT saying, 'The federal government really should not be intervening in admissions policies.' Well, of course, the federal government has been interfering in admissions policies since the 1950s—it's just now that the universities don't want it...
...When you live in that environment, work there your whole life, you start to think, `The whole world should be like this.' Sure, everybody should have tenure—why not...
...There's just one major bug, Marxism, and his name is Noam Chomsky...
...The American Spectator Terrorism and the Democrats aside, the number-one menace to the Republic right now seems to be 'spam'—e-mail pollution...
...TAS Anything specific...
...Metcalfe Living things come back from this DNA-fabrication facility—they're designing life forms as a class project...
...TAS And meanwhile someone gets diagnosed with something nasty and then spends the next three weeks on the Internet, learning all the latest information about it and then starts calling up his doctor and asking, 'Why aren't you doing this and why aren't you doing that?' Metcalfe The doctors hate it, and the reason they hate it is that it is a revelation of how little they actually know...
...Metcalfe I love MIT...
...Did you see the movie The Red Violin...
...The more, exponentially, the merrier, which explains everything from the growth of cities to the Internet explosion...
...Metcalfe [Former FCC chairmen] Reed Hundt and Bill Kennard are both Democrats, I know, but they were also smart enough to realize that we didn't want the disease that infected the telephone system to infect the Internet...
...Metcalfe More like his is arch-f***ing enemy...
...TAS How about something a little farther over the horizon...
...TAS 'Invention is a flower...
...Metcalfe I'm already bewildered...
...They weren't concerned with security...
...TAS That sounds too easy...
...Having said that we believe something, we have a stake in its being true, so therefore we ignore contrary evidence...
...TAS Don't gild the lily...
...When I meet a physicist, I always ask him: what if the red shift wasn't caused by the Doppler effect...
...TAS Tar-coated trilobites—they just happened to be there as the stuff percolates through...
...TAS Any chance that may be changing...
...But however you want to look at it, we and our computers will be getting smarter, and we don't quite yet know what to do with that...
...TAS On the other hand, there's also the problem—the worry, we should say—of technology 'biting back.' Michael Crichton has just had a best-seller about nanotechnology...
...TAS Now there's a new theory that fossil fuels are not fossil at all—they're bubbling up from the earth's core, so they're being constantly renewed...
...TAS But how did the Net escape the regulators...
...TAS Are we getting ahead of ourselves...
Vol. 36 • August 2003 • No. 4
