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 The Dark Fiber Interview with George Gilder George Gilder: When Bandwidth is Free 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. |
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