Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/fade into you/being there/Organisations/EFF/Articles/darkfiber.article

Text File | 1994-05-29 | 19KB | 351 lines

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WIRED 1.4
Electrosphere
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George Gilder: When Bandwidth Is Free
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The Dark Fiber Interview with George Gilder

By Kevin Kelly


George Gilder mixes high technology and social politics. His best-selling
book, Wealth and Poverty, practically outlined our loving embrace of
high-tech entrepreneurs in the 1980s. Research for that book led him
deeper into the physics of silicon microchips. He emerged with Microcosm,
a book about how silicon-chip technology causes matter to "collapse" into
a microcosm where the usual economies of scale are reversed: Small is
better. The impact of decentralized telecommunications prompted his
monograph Life After Television, which is in some ways a warm-up for the
book he is working on now - Telecosm - a study of how the telecomputer
will enhance individual liberty. In this interview with Wired's Executive
Editor Kevin Kelly, Gilder expounds on society's current great work:
wiring the planet.

KK: Your book, Microcosm, begins with a quote from physicist Carver Mead,
who said, "Listen to the technology; find out what it's telling you." I
was wondering, what is the current technology of modems, packet-switching,
and fiber optics telling you?

GG: It's telling me that today we're at the same general point that we
were with integrated circuits in about 1970. In 1970, people didn't
anticipate that transistors would be virtually free by today. Today you
can buy a transistor for 4,000-millionths of a cent. I think the same
thing is on its way in fiber optics. We're going to gain access to the
25,000 gigahertz of capacity that's in each of the three windows in
infrared spectrum that work with fiber optics. With 25,000 gigahertz, you
get the equivalent to the number of phone calls in America during the peak
moment on Mother's Day. Or take all the radio spectrum currently used for
communications, from AM radio to KU-band satellite. It's 1,000 times that,
on one thread of glass the width of a human hair.

I don't think people have come to terms with what fiber really means. You
can simulate any kind of switching configuration you want. All of a sudden
this huge apparatus of electronic switching that dominates our current
communications becomes unnecessary. Suddenly, you're going to find that
just as the integrated circuit rendered transistors - and hence mips and
bits - virtually free, fiber optics is going to render bandwidth and hertz
virtually free.

This world is quite different from the world that assumes bandwidth
scarcity. A dearth of spectrum has to be regulated and parceled out
carefully by sensitive federal bureaucrats beset by tens of thousands of
lawyers. That whole apparatus, both the technology of it - the huge
switching fabric of the phone companies - and the legislative apparatus
and all its bureaucracies and legal accessories, are going to be rendered
almost worthless over the next ten years.

KK: Every time I hear the phrase "virtually free" I think of the claim
about nuclear power: "too cheap to meter." It's almost utopian. I find
myself not believing it, as much as I want to go along with the idea. Am I
too skeptical?

GG: Yep. It's just that when things become free you ignore them.
Transistors that used to be seven bucks apiece now cost about a millionth
of a cent. That means that you can regard them as insignificant, just as
they're becoming ubiquitous and thus determining the whole atmosphere of
enterprise.

KK: Well, you could say that aluminum - by the atom - has become virtually
free, but that doesn't mean aluminum in any useful amount is free. As long
as we have storage devices, we'll find things to fill them up with, so
there will always be a demand for more. That means no matter how cheap
storage becomes, it won't be free. It seems to me that the appetite for
bandwidth is equally insatiable, so people will always want more than they
have. It has to cost something.

GG: Of course it will. The point is that 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.

One of the key ways you economize on bandwidth is switching. Switching has
been the whole foundation of our communications systems. You run
narrow-band wires to some switch and then switch the data to its
destination in order to avoid using lots of bandwidth to broadcast signals
to every terminal.

It seems to me that we're going to start using fiber the way we currently
address air. Instead of switching, we'll broadcast on fiber optic. We'll
be tuning in rather than processing all the bits. And instead of using a
lot of switching intelligence in order to economize on bandwidth, we're
going to use bandwidth in order to economize on intelligence.

KK: Okay. In a world where physical force, switching, and computation are
almost free, we now add almost-free bandwidth. What becomes expensive?

GG: The scarce resource is the human mind. People will be more valuable.
People will get paid better. We need people to provide the software, the
interfaces, the standards, and the protocols to all these systems that
make it possible to exploit these increasingly cheap resources. So it's
the human mind that you ultimately have to economize on. That's the reason
I think 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. They
live in this bizarre world of thermodynamics, where entropy rules, and
we're dominated by our waste products. It is very short-sighted.

KK: I take it then that as a believer in the human mind as sort of the
ultimate repository of wealth and power, that you're not a believer in
artificial intelligence as an attainable thing?

GG: Artificial intelligence is obviously attainable, it just won't be
human intelligence. It's a different function.

KK: Do you think there's a downside to having everything connected to
everything else?

GG: I don't see any. There must be a downside to the telephone, but I
can't remember what it is.

KK: Well, when you're in the middle of supper and some solicitor is
calling you, you'll probably remember what it is.

GG: Yeah, that's the downside. But that's the downside all this stuff
overcomes. When you can have intelligence in your telephone it can defer
the calls you don't want to voice mail and still take emergency calls. It
can be adapted to your needs. So, 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.

KK: When I look at networks I see counter-intuitive behavior. Distributed
networks have a remarkable ability to be slightly out of anyone's control.
They possess an organic out-of-control quality. Does that concern you?

GG: I think it's good. The Internet, for instance, is an exciting kind of
metaphor for spontaneous order. It shows that in order to have a very rich
fabric of services you don't need a regimented system of control. When
there's a lot of intelligence at the fringes everywhere, the actual
network itself can be fairly simple. The future is dumb networks.

KK: Dumb networks? Why not smart networks? We put smartness in everything
else.

GG: There's smartness all around the network, but the actual network
should be essentially dumb glass. The fibersphere, as I call it. I think
the mistake that the phone companies sometimes make is to think that they
can keep up with the computer. What they call "network intelligence" will
usually appear as a bottleneck to a computer industry that's rapidly
rushing forward into new possibilities. So 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.

KK: What is the fabric of the network?

GG: 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. KK: One would think that there is wealth to be
made in the interface then between photons and electrons.

GG: Yeah, there is. 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.

KK: There are some network advocates who claim that we can get a lot of
what we want in fiber optic by using the existing copper wires beefed up
with the ISDN communication protocol. Do you go along with the idea of
implementing (and paying for) ISDN right now?

GG: Yes. The phone companies should do ISDN. We might as well get as much
out of the existing copper switch system as we can. ISDN is already
installed in all the new switches; it's more a matter of getting the
tariffs right so they can charge some reasonable amount for its use.
There's no excuse not to do ISDN today. It won't detract from the
fibersphere. But while they do ISDN, all-optical networks are going to be
launched all over the place by different companies. Some people have this
vision that either we devote our resources to ISDN, or we devote them to
creating this fabulously expensive fiber network. My belief is that fiber
network is going to get rapidly cheaper, so that we're going to be able to
do both it and ISDN perfectly well.

KK: What role do you think the US government should play in laying data
highways?

GG: The role for the US government is to make government as efficient as
possible. Government operates leviathan laboratories, hospitals,
universities, bureaucracies, and post offices, and they all should be
interconnected with fiber.

The government always discovers a technology after its moment is passing.
If you're a winner, you don't go to the government. You're too busy.
You've got too many customers. It's the people with no customers who end
up besieging the government. There are all these wise-asses in Washington
who really think that they can choose technologies. They think they know
better. They get bowled over by every earnest representative of IBM who
comes up to talk to them. Just now the US government thinks that HDTV is
absolutely the future of the world because all the old farts at Zenith,
and the broadcasting moguls who aren't really making it with the new
computer technologies, are converging on Washington. 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.

KK: There is a myth, a utopian hope, that all these electronic connections
(what I call the "advent of the net") are going to eliminate hierarchy.
The belief is that we will come into a peer world, where everything is on
a peer-to-peer level. All the experimental work that I have seen shows
that that's probably not very likely. On the contrary, anything complex
self-organizes into nested hierarchies, just in order to manage itself.

GG: Right. The complexity of digital systems requires a hierarchical
organization. It's the only way to deal with the kind of combinatorial
explosions that attend interlinking of billions of nodes, all functioning
in parallel. You need nested hierarchies, but the real miracle of
micro-electronics is that these extraordinarily complex hierarchies can be
incorporated into individual silicon chips, with virtual supercomputer
capabilities. This fabulous supercomputer power can be ubiquitously
distributed in the fibersphere. So hierarchies do indeed exist, but they
are ubiquitously distributed, which renders them an egalitarian force.
When everybody commands a supercomputer, you give the average owner of a
work station the power that an industrial tycoon commanded in the
industrial era, or that a TV station owner commands in the age of
broadcasting. In other words, the hierarchy is in the silicon rather than
in the human organization. So you have this incredible distribution of
power. This is a period of transition that resembles the transition
between railroads and automobiles.

KK: How's that?

GG: When you ride a train you go to the railway station at a scheduled
time, you travel with the people that happen to be on the train, you go to
preset destinations. This is what the current television world is like.
You tune into the stations that have been prescribed through some
collaboration between advertisers and TV executives in New York and
Hollywood. Moving from broadcast model to the teleputer is like moving
from a railroad model to automobiles. Automobiles are essentially
egalitarian transportation systems. They aren't organized - like the
Internet. A Ferrari, say, and a Toyota Tercel look like radically
different machines, but the fact is that any car endows the average person
with more freedom than any railroad.

KK: You are a tireless champion of small business. For the last 20 years
or so, really big projects have been considered arrogant, incapable of
working because they are big. Now there is talk of Motorola's global
satellite project Iridium. Do you think that the fibersphere gives us
permission to think big again?

GG: There are going to be a lot of big fiber projects in the next decade.
They're already coming right now. I'm sort of worried that they're going
to think too small. I hope that the government, with its National Research
and Education Network (NREN) doesn't end up buying a lot of obsolescent
telephone company fiber systems that make networks with
a total power of a gigabit rather than a gigabit per terminal. The
fibersphere is a big project, and it will take scores of thousands of
small companies to do it.

KK: What about big companies?

GG: Sure. Laboratories where lots of people work on their own special
visions, with the luxury of very long-term goals, are very valuable. Such
places are usually supported by relatively big companies and consortia of
companies. IBM, AT&T, and Bell Labs developed most of the components for
all optical networks. When you're producing millions of something it
becomes a commodity, and almost by definition you have a big company.
MS-DOS and Windows are commodity products, so Microsoft is a big company.
There are cycles in which companies get big exploiting commodity products
with wide distribution, which then mature and then are displaced by new
products. It's relatively rare that the company that's triumphant in the
commodity phase can move back to the insurrection phase. Insurrections are
ordinarily led by entrepreneurs. I don't see any likelihood that will
change anytime soon.

KK: What else is the technology telling you?

GG: What the technology tells me is that, among other things, Clinton's
going to get a bonanza. He doesn't know what's coming, but technology's
just going to be breaking out all over. Bush did virtually everything that
Clinton promises to do, and because Bush has done it already it doesn't
leave Clinton much room except to play cock-a-doodle-do. He'll get up on
the post and crow as the marvelous sunrise technologies come blindingly to
the fore during his administration. They're going to have 50,000
technology programs and lo and behold, a million technologies will bloom
and they will take credit for it all.

                                   * * *

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