Phil made it big in databases, interesting talk on social and economic history of telecom.
Phil Netches intro – AT&T mgt through acquisition [Teradata, I assume].
Was going to give another pessimistic gloom and doom that the telcos are falling. Pricing power eroding. Mergers and acquisions. Capital markets confused. Sounds like turn of century – C19 to C20th.
Transportation in 1904. Steel industry like semiconductors. Steel and railroads in consolidation. # of miles of railroad peaked 100 years ago. Steel and rail started to lose employment. Automobile was an expensive toy. Only about 8000 cars. Less than 150 miles of road. Regulation! Speed limit of 10mph, had to walk in front of car at intersection, red flag, honk horn.
Some of these things have changes. But steel is still with us. Interesting thing has been the things we can make with it.
Telecom existed 100 years ago in about 8% of US homes. Long distance a great business. $11/3 minute call. Most innovative idea in 1904 was regulated monopoly best way to deliver this service.
Life expectancy in 1904 was 47 years. Next 100 years not unlikely same improvement will happen again. Healthcare and education are both trillion dollars in US. Both 2-5x bigger than telecom. Ripe for fundamental transformation.
Only 230 murders in US in 1904. Average wage was $0.22/hour.
Coal mining strikes. Concern over energy crisis.
IT and telecom has made notion of core cities and even suburbs obsolescent.
100 years ago cocaine and marijuana legal. 14% of households had bathtubs. Most women washed hair once a month.
Predictions then would would have missed rise of suburbs, women’s rights, multinationals, brands, etc.
We are at the end of the 3rd information era. About to enter 4th.
1st mechanical to electrical (jacquard loom, cash register, tabulation system). Many of these companies still exist, maybe not dominant. Fax machine was first telecoms service! Things can take off 100 years before their time.
2nd electromechanical. Brought about by two innovations. How to put a motor on cash register to give mechanical computing system enough torque to enable multistage computations. Second was vacuum tube with triode. Mechanical gain. Electrical gain. “Moore’s law” for electromechanical was at least 35% compound annual rate.
3rd electronic processing, move data photonically. Transistors, ICs, stored programs etc. Lasers and fiber. Factor of 10,000 improvement in 40 years. Steam engine 10-100x power of draft animal. 10x from that to human. Display industry 7% compound improvement rate. Batteries 3%. Grew up in area was processing was so expensive where it was most expensive part of system. Now the most expensive part is display.
GG: Aren’t displays getting better faster? PN: Displayes limited by human vision system – can’t get smaller. What keeps them on lower trajectory learning curve. 50% annual improvement rate in photonics.
4th electrophonic. Ability to make photonic devices on same chip as electronic ones. In lab today. In marketplace soon. Some of fundamental innovations not yet made. Others not recognized for their importance. Many new information platform technologies. Quantum computing. Nanotubes. Fluidics. Photonic switching. Teaching us to make sensors and actuators. Living systems had chemical sensors (smell), touch, pressure. Will be able to both sense the world as well as manipulate it.
The Next Big Thing (2050-2100)
GG: All IT is bottlenecks by the pins on chips. Need optical so that on-chip and off-chip same speed.
Another measure is the # of patents from top 3 universities with tech transfer.
Way cheaper to process a bit than to move it today. True at every scale, in chip, between chips, boxes, racks, towns and cities. Opposite could be true soon. May be cheaper to move it than process it.
Horseless carriage. People look at how new tech substitutes existing ones. Can’t deliver whole infrastructure in one big bang unless forced in face of ordinary economics by overarching force.
We all feel the discontinuities. Old paradigms lose power to extrapolate. Human ability to imagine is the only recourse.
Q: We have public policy trying to force continuity. Had canals. George Stephenson invented steam engine. Don’t have regulators insisting srteam engines to pull barges. What do we have public policy formulation by consultation. Ask “experts” how to deploy new tech. They always place themselves as part of it. Symbiotic co-dependency between government and telecom. Is this threatening to the state? Do we need to do something even more disruptive than we care to dream.
PN: The successful disruptions have begun small and grown. Don’t try to overthrow the established regime. 100 years ago had a lot of utopian and distopian literature. Worries that only alternative to capitalism was communism. Massive social tension, people literally dying in the streets. Didn’t decide to build interstate highways in 1904. Just paved Main Street.
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