We first got to know each other on those bus tours you helped put together for the Clinton-Gore ticket on the highways of America. It's great to see you leading the way when it comes to information highways, too.
It's also great to be here tonight with a group that has done so much to develop personal communication services and other advanced telecommunications services and technologies.
My own involvement with Telocator begans just ten years ago, when a woman in Anaheim, California began using a pager to keep in touch with her young son's transplant coordinator.
You saw the results on the video. Since that year, Telocator's Life Page Program has meant freedom and hope to fifty thousand patients.
Think what it means to know you face death within days unless the call comes! Think how much it can mean to know you'll get the call whether you're in the backyard or at the supermarket!
Life Page is an example of brillian technology matched with big hearts. That's whay I wanted to be part of this salute. I know the Diggets and Smiths and Parkers can testify to the impact this program has. They are living proof. And I join them and thousands of other families in thanking you for your generosity.
I also want to congratulate you.
With the FCC decision to create PCS licenses this month, America's telecommunications industry reaches a historic crossroads. Telocator has helped bring America to that crossroads. It will keep American competitive, and it will create jobs, as we accelerate the world's headlong race toward the Age of Information.
Recently I've been doing some racing. It's a way to relax--and burn off the calories from dinners like this one. In fact, last week, in the middle of the Nike Challenge Race in Washington, I was pleased to see a team of five runners from the FCC puffing along.
They seemed to be in a lot of pain--their shirts read the five megahurts.
I can't say I reflected much about this during the race--I was hurting pretty badly myself. But in a way, isn't our entire history a kind of race? It's a relay race, in which each generation hands off the baton to the next.
Hopefully, it is a baton enriched by what we have experienced and learned. Certainly that has been the case when it comes to the science of communications.
Anyone who grows up in Tennessee learns about how Andrew Jackson fought the battle of New Orleans two weeks after the treaty of Ghent was signed ending the War of 1812. In those days, information could only be sent by ship.
A few decades later that changed. Samuel Morse sent his famous message from a ground-floor room in the Capitol building; then, Cyrus Field organized the laying of the transatlantic cable.
Marconi showed that electromagnetic waves could carry messages around the earth's curvature.
We benefit from their work. And today, we stand poised on the brink of a revolution fully the equal of any in history: distributed networks connecting a myriad of computers, ranging from megaflop machines and workstations to desktop and personal laptops.
There's no doubt about it. Information superhighways will utterly reshape our world.
In the next decade it will be possible for an elementary school student to come home and, instead of playing Nintendo, plug into the Library of Congress. It'll be possible for manufacturers to communicate with their suppliers through three-dimensional blueprints and prototypes.
We're going to have computers--in one writer's words--"as mobile as a watch and as personal as a wallet."
It will be possible for creators of software and other forms of electronic intellectual property to download their products into a national grid and make instant contact between buyers and sellers.
It used to be that a nation's transportation infrastructure determined economic success. But in the decades ahead, moving information will be more important than moving ships.
Now, of course, technology is morally neutral. You could use the printing press to publish the Bible or "Mein Kampf." And in many cases we have seen technology provide a mixed blessing for the human race. We see that when it comes to the environment.
This, after all, is the first century in which human beings possess the technology to dramatically affect the composition of this planet and its atmosphere. Ahundred years ago, aliens in a spaceship anchored out near Jupiter would have had a hard time figuring out if there was life on this planet. Now they'd have no problem. They'd be able to see the higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, the depletion of our ozone, the wastes that have been the byproduct of the chemical revolution--each one of you reading this article produces more than twice your weight in waste very day, much of it dangerous and much of it unnecessary--are all cautionary tales.
How do we harness technology in the service of humanity? After all, you can use a pager to save a life--or to sell drugs.
How do we make sure that this next revolution which promises to so enhance our ability to inform, will enhance the quality of our lives and those of our descendants?
I want to acknowledge that when it comes to the information highways there are legitimate concerns about privacy, and about the rights of computer users--issues this Administration is grappling with, by the way.
But on the whole, the advent of information highways is grounds for great optimism.
The principle that information is good lies at the foundation of representative democracy. Americans still believe that the best way for a nation to make political decisions is for all its citizens to process the information relevant to their lives and express their conclusions freely.
Communism, by contrast, attempted to bring all the information to a large and powerful central processor--which collapsed when it was overwhelmed by ever-more complex information.
Computers will provide human beings with the ability to process information no civilization on earth has ever had. We can't hold it back when it comes to creating information highways. America should lead the way.
What can the federal government do to help?
We can fund new technologies--and we will.
We can adopt policies to unleash private investment and innovation--and we will.
We can make sure all Americans benefit. We'll do that, too.
After all, we're talking about what is a $3.5-trillion-dollar market, according to the estimate of John Sculley. We are already in feverish competition with Europe and the countries of the Pacific Rim.
That's why this administration has made the creation of the National Information Infrastructure one of our top priorities.
A few weeks ago, I released a new report. It was called "The National Information Infrastructure--Agenda for Action." It mapped out our strategy for accelerating the development of a system of telecommunications networks that will give every American the information they need, when they need it and where they need it--for an affordable price.
This infrastructure will make it as easy to share video information as it is to make a phone call today.
The potential is staggering. Arthur D. Little forecasts 60 million customers for PCS (Personal Communications Services) by the year 2005. Our National Information Infrastructure initiative can result in $300 billion in new sales--and a 20-40 percent increase in productivity.
Advances like electronic claims will have an enormous impact in health care, where 25 percent of our costs go to paperwork and bureaucracy--and where 11 percent of all tests are reordered because of lost results.
How quickly American businesses move into the information age will determine whether they will compete--or go into Chapter 11.
The wireless industry has a vital and expanding role to play in this infrastructure. Not everybody understands this. Part of the confusion stems from all the comparisons we make between the interstate highway system and the "information highways" we will need for the 21st century.
I've used it often myself. After all, like the interstates and other types of traditional infrastructure, the information infrastructure will generate huge economic benefits for all Americans. The interstates created new industries and new jobs--not to mention all those McDonald's and Hot Shoppes and Exxon stations and Holiday Inns.
Information highways will have the same effect.
But there are some important differences.
For one thing, the National Information Infrastructure will not be built and paid for by the federal government. It will be built by private companies, including many of the onews represented here.
It will also consist of lots of different components. The National Information Infrastructure will be a "network of networks" using many types of technologies--cable, wireless, fiber optics and satellites. (Many people think the NII will consist only of fiber optic links. Wrong. We will use different technologies for different needs.)
The important thing is that all these networks will interconnect. If I want to make a phone call--or set up a video conference--with you, the signals may be carried first by radio, then by cable, and then by fiber.
Wireless will be particularly important for the "last mile." In many cases, wireless will be the most economical way to connect the main office to the customer. And certainly phones and cable TV can't provide mobile applications. Americans will want information where they are--and that's why, for people on the move, wireless is the answer.
If the fiber optic networks are the "information superhighways," then spectrum for new wireless technologies will provide the "information skyways."
That's why I'm so excited that the President signed the Emerging Telecommunications Technology Act. That'll allow us to auction off at least 200 MHz of spectrum to the FCC for licensing to the private sector--the cellular phone industry was created by licensing only 50 MHz.
We're also working to reallocate spectrum for Personal Communications Services (PCS). This will bring over 300,000 jobs for Americans.
Which brings up a final point. Let me make it as bluntly as I can.
When you walk into your homes and offices in the next few days, look around. You will see a room full of products invented by Americans--but manufactured only abroad.
Color TV. RCA scientists dreamed it up. Now European and East Asian companies make almost all of them. The VCR. Invented here. Now almost none are made here.
The microwave oven. Scientists at Raytheon developed it. Now 90 percent come from Japan and Korea.
Who's to blame?
That's a question that reminds me of the story of two men sitting together on an airplane. After about an hour, the first one says, "One of our deodorants isn't working."
"Must be yours," the second one says. "I don't use any."
Up in Washington, you can always find somebody willing to blame the other guy. But there's more than enough blame to go around.
The point is not to let that happen any more. Of that $3.5 trillion John Sculley talks about, how much are we going to export? How much will be exported to us?
This time we can't fail. The stakes are too high. We must work together to make sure that the National Information Infrastructure is not just a consumer boon for American but a jobs boon, and working together we can do it.
In 1899 Charles Duell, the director of the U.S. Patent Office, said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
This industry is living proof of just how wrong he was.
And we don't have to imagine the future to see why. The present is amazing enough.
A President speaks on health care and is seen instantly by millions in the quiet of their living rooms. Reporters file stories on their PCs and the stories appear in print without a line of type--or even a hard copy touched by human hands. A grad student wants the full speech and turns on his computer to get it via Internet.
All around us, each day, the information highways grow and combine in ways none of us could have imagined in college when we felt the future was an electric typewriter.
In these days when it is sometimes hard to look beyond next week, it is important to look out beyond next year, beyond next decade, beyond the next century. For the steps we make now can influence the future as surely as the steps taken by those first unknown human beings who learned to light fires--or create metal from what looked like rock.
I remember once, a few years ago, I was at the very bottom of the Earth, in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight, talking with a scientist about the tunnel he was digging through time.
He pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing, where the pollution levels were measurable in the ice. And then he moved his finger back to the ice of two decades ago. "Here's where the U.S. Congress passed the Clean Air Act," he said.
And you realized how the action of one government could make a difference even in the remotest place on Earth.
What government does with information highways will not be so easily measurable in ice samples. But over the next century, as we move inexorably to the wireless age, its effect will be as great, even at the South Pole.
And in the end, when the history of our time is written, when the heat of political battle has cooled and our speeches forgotten, our descendants will say that we didn't drop the baton; that through your work and mine, working in tandem, we passed that baton along.
And they'll say that we passed it on with an enlarged potential for good.
They'll see that potential for good reflected in something as small as a pager
--and as big as the hearts of those who give them away.
