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 Sequence: Volume 29, Number 4 Release Date: July/August 1994 Talking with George Gilder By Educom Staff An information technology visionary who writes compellingly about the relationship between technology and economics, George Gilder is the author of Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology (1989), Wealth and Poverty (1981), and numerous other works. His 1990 book Life after Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life is now being issued by W.W. Norton Co. in a revised paperback edition with five new chapters. Gilder has been a fellow of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and is currently a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He lectures widely across the Country and around the world and will be a featured speaker at the Educom'94 conference this fall in San Antonio. Educom Review caught up with him just as he was about to leave for Europe to present a speech at Cambridge University. Educom Review: You've used "A Convergence of Corpses" as the title for the prologue to Life after Television, and you've said that mergers such as the one recently attempted by Bell Atlantic and TCI "mostly miss the point of the digital age." Who are all these corpses, and how are all these mergers missing the point? GILDER: The real driving force of all this information technology is the triumph of the computer. Just as the personal computer essentially displaced the mainframe over the past ten years, over the next ten years the personal computer will displace the television set, the telephone, and an array of other appliances. So companies that attempt to exploit the opportunities of convergence by converging with TV sets, for example, tend to fail, as 3DO seems already to have failed, precisely because of that mistake. Meanwhile, Creative Labs was based on a less exciting technology—a soundboard for the PC—but has become an enormous company riding the tremendous ascendancy of personal computing. ER: So your advice to 3DO would have been . . . ? GILDER: Well, my advice at the time was that they had better get connected to computers and regard computers as the interactive appliance. If they focused on the TV set, they would lose. And that's what seems to have been happening. Other errors are being made by companies that target the set-top box and devote an enormous amount of design effort to squeezing computing power into the price point and form factor of a consumer electronics set-top box. ER: Why did 3DO ignore your advice? GILDER: Well, I guess they were just infatuated with television. They'd come from founding MTV, and they imagined TV as an instrument with a future that somehow commands larger markets than the personal computer. But personal computers in homes are increasing ten times faster than television sets, and PC owners spend fifteen hundred bucks for the device itself and then another fifteen hundred bucks on software and peripherals, and within that price point you can accomplish anything that a set-top box or game machine can accomplish. And if you have broadband connections, for example, over cable lines through a cable modem, the PC can do anything the TV can do and do it just as well. That's the key limitation today: bandwidth. As Andy Grove says, infinite processing power will get you only so far with limited bandwidth. The key to the next generation of computer development is coupling the personal computer with broadband networks. Today, the personal computer is crippled by its need to devote most of its MIPs [million instructions per second], or a large portion of them, to compressing and decompressing any images that it uses. Thus teleconferencing, for example, and video telephones are so drastically unsatisfactory because all the computer MIPs are devoted to compressing and decompressing rather than to real computer functions. Once the PC is connected to broadband networks, it will really ascend to its dominant level in homes as well as offices. And that will be the crucial opportunity for educational materials as well. ER: You say in Life after Television that "TV ignores the reality that people are not inherently couch potatoes; given a chance they talk back and interact." Then how do you explain some of the disappointments of interactivity, such as GTE's Cerritos project, or the US West/TCI project in Denver, neither of which seemed to gain much loyalty from its subscribers? GILDER: The explanation is that they all use the TV, and the TV is inherently a couch potato device, which is particularly lame at presenting text. Yet text is a crucial part of multimedia communications and interactivity. Those projects made the same error that 3DO made: they converged with a corpse. Unless you're a necrophiliac, that's not particularly gratifying. ER: Alan Kay used the phrase "mouse potatoes" to express the concern that the new media would be mass communications oriented and that literacy would fall apart. GILDER: Well, any instrument that creates "mouse potatoes" is going to fail, because it's going to make people poorer. Markets expand in the long run only if they are absolutely central industries in the economy—if they're creating capital rather than depleting it. TV in general dissipates and deflates human capital, and game machines are distractions that fail to edify their users. The people who use PCs generate wealth with them rather than merely distract themselves, so they're willing to invest a lot more effort into their PCs. They're willing to master the intricacies of use, and they're also willing to contribute to the development of further applications. In contrast, all these consumer electronics devices are mostly self-limiting, because they don't contribute to wealth creation, but instead actually distract people from their career and their higher pursuits. ER: By emphasizing the extent to which people are different, don't you run the risk of ignoring how much they are actually the same, that is, of ignoring what we might uncharitably call the herd instinct that dictates a lot of fashion, a lot of politics, and a lot of life? GILDER: Well, I think that people are the same in relatively lower-level ways, so if you have a medium that appeals chiefly to the way people are the same, they're going to gravitate increasingly to prurient interests, morbid fears and anxieties, and shocks and sensations. If you do that, the whole culture will become depraved—and I think that's what happened with the TV—whereas I think that if you appeal to people's special curiosities and hobbies and career interests and other ambitions—if you appeal to people's first choices rather than their lowest-common-denominator choices—then the culture gravitates toward excellence rather than toward mediocrity, toward distinction rather than prurient interest and titillation. |
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