Copyright, 1999, Max K. Goff, all rights reserved
One of the most interesting aspects of holding a job with a title like "technology evangelist" is the license that comes with the "evangelist" part of the role. As an evangelist, a great deal of leeway is allowed when it comes to salient topics covered, approaches to communication, and even the messages to communicate. Naturally Sun's technology is (and should be) at center stage during such soirees. But there is also room for the occasional epiphany.
I still recall the event, over a year ago now, when I first delivered what was at the time to become the manifesto of my travels: If there's hope for humanity, it's in software. It is still a message that surprises, entertains, baffles and even angers. But it serves to set the stage for what I hope will be a session of exploration and imagination.
By "software," I mean all that is part of the computer/software/datacomm space; those fundamental "high technology" breakthroughs that are infecting other economies at an increasingly rapid rate. Given that much of the ecological demise of our planet is due to the unintended consequences of human technological activities, it is rather ironic and even cheeky to assert that mankind's hope lies in yet more of the same. But in the case of Internet/Information Technology, i.e.: software, that is exactly the assertion I am making.
The nature of software is to optimize. As such, computing costs are going down even as data communications bandwidth is increasing. The rules that govern this Information Age economy are fundamentally different than the rules that governed the Industrial Age. Since the "unit cost" for a piece of software is essentially zero, especially when the distribution of the software is done via the Internet, the tendency for software pricing will always be to be driven toward zero. As more and more bits (software) replace more and more atoms in communications, manufacturing, design, production, distribution, marketing and sales of just about everything, the cost of "stuff" will gradually but most assuredly continue to come down, asymptotically approaching zero.
Imagine a world where all basic goods and services are essentially free. Not because some government decreed that it be so, but because market forces are such as to give away that which is of most value in order to secure the currency of the next century, that being the conscious attention of others. Consciousness itself will be the currency of this new age. Just as a child craves attention, just as the actor is invigorated by the attention of the audience, just as the quantum event is not decided until it is observed, the energy exchange netted from the conscious attention one sentient being gives another is the essential creative force of the universe. Indeed, if there were no one to grok it, the universe would not exist. But I digress....the point is this: Basic stuff will be essentially free, due the the global frictionless economic framework provided by Internetworked technologies (software).
Add to this a global broadband multimedia network capable of ensconcing the user in near holodeck experiences, and a Star Trek Utopian technoverse beckons just around the corner....if we can only make it to the point when a computer is smarter than any human being. At that point, the intelligence curve will turn to a near infinite asymptote, when computers themselves design and build the next, more intelligent generation. And then the next, and then the next, and then we're likely to see Moore's Law tilt up toward the sky and the Omega Point smiling back at us from that Matrix not so far ahead of us...around the end of the 2020s or so. Gee, didn't Nostradamus have a problem seeing beyond that point too? Interesting. :)
If you could view all reality, everything that is important in reality, in real time represented by software objects from what ever Internet interface you may choose, how would your world change? What if you knew exactly where your daughter's car was on the interstate? What if she could virtually teleport to her birthday celebration, despite the fact that we was caught in traffic? What if the traffic despair, the worst of the year, meant only a five minute delay from optimal commute? And what if optimal commute time was the norm for all? Better yet, what if commuting, for 95% of humanity, was a thing of the past, because nearly the entire planet could telecommute?
We're at or very nearly at the precipice. Ecologically speaking, this next decade will probably be the worst in human history. More species will die than have gone extinct since the last of the dinosaurs kicked 65 million years ago. The ozone holes will get bigger, because we still haven't licked the CFC emissions problem. The coral reefs will all be dead or nearly dead, and the ripple effect of that loss along with the final demise of the last of the rain forests, and we'll find ourselves very nearly like that life that emerged just a few years after the asteroid hit, or the volcanoes went off, or whatever it was that wreaked so much havoc as to yield an extinction level event.
I have the habit of putting things off till the last minute. If it's something I have to write, or a presentation I have to ready, a part I have to learn, or a book I have to read, I will always put it off until the last minute. It seems to be in my nature, to behave that way. I take comfort in this now. I know that societies reflect the characteristics of the individuals that make up those societies. And I think that's perhaps what we're doing: we're putting things off until the last minute. And just when we're at the very edge of complete ecological collapse, the learning curve will tilt, our silicon children will engineer all the answers, and the techno-topia too wonderful to imagine will scoop us up and carry us along on the evolutionary dreamscape well beyond the imagination of even the most gifted among us.
There is hope, my friends. Great hope. And it's in software, in the larger sense of the word. Ironically, the hope we have is in the very technology that has entrapped us. Ironically, we're bootstrapping God .
