In The Idea Factory, we find a chronicle of great men, among them Claude Shannon, who dedicated themselves to solving big problems.
The transistors, capacitors, semi-conductors and the silicon chip (later became the magical wafer of Intel and the Valley industry).
Even an unheard-of technology of the time – cellular transmission – was shelved, since it was deemed unfeasible (ATT was still sore from its failed Picture Phone attempt).
We need brave and sustained efforts to get our voice heard in the wilderness. Right now, it’s climate change, Ebola and the threat of sectarian conflicts.
We got F22.
But we actually need Ebola vaccines.
We need Claude Shannon, who among other things, juggled the balls just to think.
Pulse code modulation.
On and off.
Beautiful!
Just like its predecessor Morse code.
Tit tit tit, tat tat tat.
I got your message. I hear you loud and clear.
We are in this together i.e. suffer our common human fate in the face of change.
We see not the future.
But it’s coming whether we like it or not.
Fast approaching, with chip speed doubled every year and a half or so.
Hence, Moore’s Law.
The Great Men projects, funded by phone users’ revenue, tackled communications problems e.g. fidelity (Can you hear me now).
From Marconi to Moore, they gave us wireless and wire line, fast chips and Facebook.
All of a sudden, the message is delivered in the bottle. Small bottles, called bits – strings of 1’s and 0’s.
Bam! the Gigabit economy is here, offering and enticing us with more bandwidth, more in the Cloud.
No time for contemplation or reflection. The more “friends”, the more feeds, the more frivolity. We once were blind, but now we see, once information-starved, but now stuffed.
“I am mad like Hell, I won’t take this anymore”, says the rogue anchor on NETWORK (the movie). If he has to update his protest, it would be “Feed me no more of those lies. I want the truth, even if I can’t handle it.”
What we need is the Ebola vaccine. Instead, we’ve got sci-fi and wi-fi.
Instead of connecting the dots, they gave us dots, by the trillions.
Google not only “organizes the world information”, it also seeks to replace our memory, de facto. Our only job as consumers of ready-served apps is to “amuse ourselves to death” in this information deluge.
Where are those Great Men of the Bell Labs Age? Aren’t we faced with a dangerous and uncertain future as men of the last century? Or is this our last?
We might inadvertently have done it to ourselves as we go about ignoring big problems. A classic case of bystander apathy, of kicking the can further down the road.
Dead men walking, walk on by. Ignore the can at your own peril.
Thang Nguyen 555 